Anthropic IPO valuation talk slides towards $1.2 trillion as roadshow opens
Anthropic is marketing its Nasdaq listing at a much lower price than the market expected only weeks ago. Institutional investors are pushing back on valuation after a broad sell-off in artificial intelligence stocks.
According to Bloomberg, prospective buyers have been discussing a valuation of roughly $1.2 trillion to $1.3 trillion, and some are weighing a figure as low as $1.1 trillion. Investors had earlier signalled $1.4 trillion to $1.5 trillion to bankers. In early October, some backers floated $2 trillion.
The retreat followed a bruising session on 5 November, when the Nasdaq 100 fell 6.4% and lost about $2.3 trillion in market value. BNP Paribas’s Stephan Kemper suggested valuations might need to settle 10% to 15% below the rumoured $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion target. HSBC’s Max Kettner said a figure of about $1 trillion would be “more comfortable”.
According to Inki Cho, senior financial markets strategist at Exness, “The lower valuation may just be an immediate effect of the blistering AI tech sell-off. In reality, though, it has deeper economic implications. Does Anthropic have a so-called ‘economic moat’, or in other words, is the IPO economically viable? This is one of the questions worth pondering on as it prepares to hit the market at a $1.2 trillion valuation, which drags the share price down within the range of $70-$78.”
The San Francisco-based company filed publicly on 26 October to list its Class A common stock on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker ANT. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley lead the underwriting syndicate, and reports point to a listing in the week of 16 November.
Anthropic goes into the roadshow with revenue growth no listed software company has matched. Its amended S-1, filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission on 2 November, shows $33.2 billion in revenue for the first nine months of 2026. That compares with roughly $2.5 billion a year earlier, about a thirteenfold increase. Third-quarter revenue was $17.0 billion, up from $11.6 billion in the second quarter. Most of it came from usage-based billing paid by developers and enterprises.
The company booked its first operating profit, $974 million, in the second quarter. It slipped back to a $567 million operating loss in the third. The headline net loss for the nine months reached $104 billion. Most of that came from non-cash changes in the fair value of convertible notes and derivative liabilities, rather than from operations; the first half alone carried a $72.4 billion fair-value charge.
Investors are less worried about demand than about the cost of serving it. For the first time, the filing totals Anthropic’s purchase commitments and leases: about $895.4 billion, almost all of it for compute and infrastructure. Roughly $69.8 billion falls due in the next 12 months and about $447.5 billion by the end of 2030. The rest runs to 2045.
Amazon and Google are major shareholders, and also two of Anthropic’s largest compute suppliers. That two-way relationship has sharpened a debate over how to value the company: at software multiples, or as something closer to a capital-intensive infrastructure business.
The listing will be the first public-market pricing of a frontier AI lab. It will set a benchmark for private rivals such as OpenAI, whose chief executive Sam Altman has ruled out a 2026 listing, and Mistral. Anthropic was valued at $965 billion after its May funding round, so even the lower end of current talk would be a step up from that. However, it would fall well short of the $1.77 trillion record SpaceX set when it listed in June.
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