See How Anthropic Arrived at Its Mind-Boggling $40 Trillion Market Opportunity

Its estimated market opportunity, tied to the economic value of work produced by knowledge workers, tops SpaceX’s enormous figure from earlier this year

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Anthropic is giving new meaning to the idea of a total addressable market—a business term for potential revenue opportunities.

In a filing Monday ahead of its planned initial public offering, the artificial intelligence company didn’t explicitly list a “total addressable market” figure but suggested it is staring down a $40 trillion-a-year opportunity if it captures the entirety of demand. That would top SpaceX’s enormous $28.5 trillion estimate from earlier this year.

The range in estimates from cloud-storage and data company Snowflake to Anthropic shows how companies turn everything from software spending to human labor into a measure of their potential market.

Snowflake’s calculation is fairly straightforward: How many potential customers are there, and how much could each spend? Airbnb and Uber move one step outward, measuring the spending associated with the underlying activity rather than a company’s own products.

In its 2020 filing, for example, Airbnb organized its $3.4 trillion addressable market into three distinct segments: short-term stays, long-term stays and experiences.

SpaceX took the calculation a step further, pinning most of its opportunity to projections of the developing AI market.

Elon Musk’s rocket maker outlined three segments and estimated its AI business to have the largest potential of the group, with a bigger opportunity than its connectivity and space endeavors. SpaceX called its total addressable market “the largest actionable” market in “human history.”

Anthropic, in its filing this week, took the concept to its broadest point yet: What if the market isn’t an existing product category at all, but the economic value of work that AI could perform?

The company said it believes the work that knowledge workers perform represented more than $40 trillion in economic value last year. “With frontier AI’s potential to make them meaningfully more productive, our near-term opportunity is to expand this value and accelerate economic growth,” the filing said.

Anthropic cited IDC estimates that investment in AI solutions and services will lead to a cumulative global economic impact of $22.5 trillion by 2031.

“We believe the impact could be even greater.”

That makes the company’s total addressable market both potentially enormous and harder to independently verify.

A company’s addressable market isn’t a sales forecast, nor does it mean the firm expects to capture anything close to 100% of it. Anthropic’s current revenue, for example, is measured in billions, not trillions.

The giant denominator tells investors that even extraordinary growth today could represent only a small share of a much larger opportunity.

Write to Anvee Bhutani at anvee.bhutani@wsj.com and Nate Rattner at nate.rattner@wsj.com