- Anthropic’s IPO filing puts the Claude maker on course for what could be the largest initial stock offering in history, and investors already measure its potential market value in the trillions. Its valuation has jumped from $183 billion a little over a year ago to $965 billion in its last private round, with early expectations of nearly $2 trillion once public, according to Bloomberg.
- The company is deeply wired into the megacaps. In the first half of 2026, 48% of its sales came through the cloud marketplaces of three technology firms, Microsoft, Amazon and Alphabet, which all hold stakes in it; about $77 billion of notes can be issued to Amazon, Broadcom and Google in the IPO, and Microsoft and Nvidia agreed to invest $15 billion.
- Growth is strong but slowing. First-half revenue of $16.3 billion was more than 14 times the year-earlier level, yet Bloomberg previously reported that quarter-over-quarter growth slowed from around 140% to 45% between the second and third quarters. Anthropic has committed $417 billion to computing and infrastructure since the end of 2025, after a net loss of almost $42 billion in 2025 and nearly $81 billion in the first half of this year.
- There are some offsets: Anthropic held almost $132 billion of cash, equivalents and short-term investments at the end of June and reported $974 million of operating income in the second quarter after five quarters of operating losses. “If it underperforms expectations, it’ll be a little bit of a house of cards,” Sapphire Ventures co-founder Jai Das told CNBC.
What Happened?
Anthropic publicly filed its IPO paperwork on Monday and is poised to be the first major US firm focused solely on building AI software to list, according to Bloomberg. CNBC reported that it will be the third company to go public at a valuation above $1 trillion, after Saudi Aramco and SpaceX, which debuted in June, with OpenAI possibly the fourth; OpenAI has filed confidentially but said a debut likely won’t come until 2027. The listing arrives as neoclouds and data center companies have been hit hard, with Australia’s Firmus and SK Hynix’s US-based Solidigm unit withdrawing IPO plans. Fortune 500 companies committed less than 0.1% of their total expenses to Anthropic’s models and services in the latest quarter, a figure the company presents as evidence that adoption is early.
Why It Matters?
More than one-third of the S&P 500’s value comes from tech’s trillion-dollar companies, all of which are heavily exposed to AI, so the reception for Anthropic’s shares will feed directly into how investors price that capex. A strong debut would validate the circular web of chip, cloud and financing deals around the company, while a weak one could reset private valuations across the venture AI world, FTV Capital’s Brad Bernstein said. New Constructs CEO David Trainer wrote last month that if AI liquidity dries up, he sees 20% downside risk in the S&P 500, concentrated in AI-related stocks. The cloud concentration also cuts both ways, since some of the firms selling Claude are building their own models and could eventually reduce reliance on it.
What’s Next?
Investors will watch for the price range and timing, as well as whether demand is strong enough to support a valuation near the $2 trillion that early expectations point to. A lackluster debut could push OpenAI’s offering even further out and force a rethink of its valuation, while a strong one is expected to reopen the IPO window for other AI startups. Rising interest rates are making debt more expensive for companies, which raises the stakes for equity funding of Anthropic’s compute plans. Competition from cheaper open-weight models is another variable: Snowflake, which is rooting for Anthropic, is also experimenting with low-cost models from China’s Moonshot AI, DeepSeek and Zhipu.
