Following SpaceX’s spectacular stock-market debut, Anthropic is poised to stake its claim on a market potential that could be even more dizzying.
According to sources familiar with the matter cited by The Wall Street Journal, the developers behind Claude would target a total addressable market (TAM) exceeding $30 trillion, compared with $28.5 trillion for Elon Musk’s company.
The calculation of the “total addressable market” (TAM) is a common practice in fundraising: it involves estimating the theoretical maximum revenue a company could generate if it captured its entire market, based on industry data and banking projections. A fundamentally approximate exercise, and all the more uncertain when attempting to measure the potential impact of artificial intelligence on entire sectors of the economy.
The threshold of $28.5 trillion highlighted by SpaceX in May — of which $26.5 trillion were attributed to AI-related opportunities alone — marked a break in scale, provoking a degree of skepticism among analysts.
The WSJ recalls that Aswath Damodaran, a finance professor at New York University nicknamed the “Dean of Valuation,” had, even before SpaceX’s June listing, argued that this kind of projection was already flirting with the limits of credibility and could easily exceed them.
To build its own figure, Anthropic would rely on a different logic by evaluating the totality of professional tasks that could ultimately be carried out by AI models.
Nevertheless, these figures remain provisional. Anthropic’s plans are still under negotiation and could evolve before the publication of its official financial documents, expected in the coming weeks. A move that could materialize as early as September, or even at the very start of October.
