Crypto traders have assigned artificial intelligence company Anthropic an implied valuation of about $2.12tn, despite the Claude maker remaining privately owned and having no publicly traded shares.
The figure comes from synthetic perpetual contracts linked to Anthropic’s name. These products do not represent company shares, do not give holders ownership and are instead leveraged derivatives based on traders’ views of what the company might eventually be worth.
OpenAI, another leading AI company, has also seen its equivalent synthetic contracts imply a valuation of about $1.58tn.
On 9 September, DefiLlama’s pre-IPO dashboard showed Binance’s ANTHROPIC/USDT contract trading at about $2,120. Binance uses an assumed share count of one billion, meaning the contract price translates into an implied company valuation of approximately $2.12tn.
Comparable contracts on Bitget, Kraken, BingX, Aster and Coinbase International were trading within a similar range.
The implied valuation is more than twice Anthropic’s most recent negotiated private-market value. The company raised $65bn in a Series H funding round on 28 May, giving it a post-financing valuation of $965bn.
Trading in the contracts had already been volatile in late August. Binance-tracked ANTHROPIC/USDT markets moved between roughly $1,600 and $1,840, suggesting an implied valuation of $1.6tn to $1.84tn using the same assumed share count.
A separate Hyperliquid market launched by Entropy briefly traded above the $2tn mark before settling at close to $1.97tn around 28 August.
However, none of these instruments are Anthropic equity. Binance introduced ANTHROPIC/USDT on 2 June as a USDT-margined perpetual contract, offering traders leverage of up to 20 times. The contract is settled in tether and its value is determined by trading activity on the exchange rather than by a quoted public share price.
Binance says the one-billion-share figure is provided for information only. It also states that any valuation inferred from the contract is not attributable to, or endorsed by, the exchange.
“If the Pre-IPO Perp is transitioned to a TradFi Perp, a Pre-IPO Transition Notice will be issued,” Binance explains on its web portal.
OKX applies an assumed share count of 10 billion. That produces a lower price per contract unit but results in a broadly similar implied valuation for Anthropic.
The contracts do not place traders on Anthropic’s cap table and do not provide shares when they settle. Instead, they allow participants to speculate on the company’s possible future valuation. The ANTHROPIC ticker may resemble a conventional stock symbol, but there is no publicly traded Anthropic stock behind it.
A separate token has added to the potential confusion. Prestocks issues an ANTHROPIC token on Solana, claiming to provide economic exposure through a special-purpose vehicle, or SPV.
On 9 September, that token traded at approximately $961 to $973, with a market capitalisation of about $7.1m to $7.2m. Prestocks’ dashboard, meanwhile, displayed an implied Anthropic valuation close to $1.59tn.
Anthropic has rejected that arrangement. In May, it said it did not allow SPVs to acquire Anthropic stock, that any transfers into an SPV were void and that third parties offering exposure through tokenised securities, forward contracts or similar products could be selling investments with no value.
Following the warning, PreStocks tokens fell by about 34% to 45%.
There are nevertheless reasons why traders are willing to speculate on Anthropic. Its private-market valuation rose from $380bn in February to $965bn in May. The company’s annualised revenue run-rate was reported at about $47bn when its Series H round closed and later reached approximately $65bn by the end of July.
Bankers and investors have discussed a potential stock market listing at a valuation between $1.5tn and $2tn. But the contracts themselves remain very small compared with the valuations they imply.
DefiLlama lists more than a dozen Anthropic perpetual markets, while the combined open interest on the largest platforms is only in the tens of millions of dollars.
OpenAI has seen similar activity. Its OPENAI/USDT pre-IPO contract traded at about $1,578 on Binance on 9 September, while OpenAI pre-IPO assets changed hands for $1,604 on Kraken.
Prestocks listed OpenAI tokens at $1,084 and showed an implied market capitalisation of $1.34tn. Like Anthropic, OpenAI has disclosed confidentially to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that it planned to go public.
Investors who treat ANTHROPIC/USDT, or any other pre-IPO contract or token, as a genuine equity price are taking a significant risk. Binance says it will rescale the contract if an amended S-1 filing shows a share count that differs from its estimate by 3% or more.
The eventual initial public offering is likely to provide the clearest test of the figures currently being generated by the derivatives markets. Until registered shares are priced, the $2.12tn valuation remains a leveraged crypto-market opinion about Anthropic’s future worth.
It is not a price authorised, offered or promised by Anthropic to investors. Coinbase has also launched pre-IPO perpetual futures linked to OpenAI and Anthropic, giving eligible non-U.S. traders another way to track the companies’ implied valuations.
