NEW YORK — Some of Anthropic’s own investors are privately cooling on the eye-watering numbers once attached to the AI company’s planned November stock market debut. Investors who attended the company’s investor day on Wednesday in San Francisco discussed a valuation of around $1.5 trillion, according to three people familiar with the matter cited by Reuters — a significant step down from the roughly $2 trillion valuation investors had previously expected for the share sale.
The shift follows Anthropic’s latest financial disclosures, four people familiar with the matter told Reuters. At Wednesday’s meeting, Anthropic told prospective IPO investors that third-quarter revenue jumped 45% to $16.8 billion from the previous quarter, and that the company was profitable on an adjusted basis during the quarter, Reuters reported on October 15.
Those figures addressed some of Wall Street’s anxieties about the massive costs of developing AI systems. But the people familiar with the discussions said some investors were disappointed by the slowing sequential growth rate: Anthropic’s revenue had more than doubled from the first quarter to $11.6 billion in the second quarter, making the 45% step-up in the third quarter look comparatively modest. Anthropic did not immediately respond to requests for comment, Reuters said.
The financing question behind the valuation
The recalibration matters because of what it says about the AI industry’s ballooning financing needs. Reuters reported that Anthropic has committed to spend at least $518 billion over the next ten years on cloud services, computing, and infrastructure. The company reported a $42 billion loss in 2025, according to Reuters — a scale-first strategy that depends on investors continuing to pay ever-higher multiples of revenue.
The timing is delicate. The Nasdaq Composite fell 2.14% on Friday to close at 26,140.03, snapping a four-week winning streak and logging its worst week since June, with the PHLX semiconductor index down 11.4% on the week. Shares and bonds of Nvidia-backed CoreWeave, an AI data-center operator, have been sliding amid doubts about debt taken on to fund AI buildouts, Reuters reported. “A cooler reception for Anthropic’s IPO could weigh on the wider AI market, whose near-term prospects investors see as hinging largely on the share sale’s success, followed by OpenAI’s potential listing next year,” Reuters noted.
Friday’s market backdrop
The valuation debate closed out a rough week. The S&P 500 ended Friday at 7,659.44, down 1.09% on the day, while the Dow slipped 0.34% to 52,002.41. The 10-year Treasury yield finished around 5.09%, easing about 15 basis points on the week from roughly 5.24%. Gold held near $4,165 an ounce; Brent crude settled at $109.86 a barrel, its highest since May, and U.S. crude closed above $101 for the first time since September.
Inflation worries persist: U.S. producer prices rose 6.3% year-on-year in September, the highest since December 2022, and consumer prices accelerated to 3.7%, according to official data. Implied odds of an October Fed rate hike fell to 17% from 28% after Fed Chair Kevin Warsh gave no signal on the late-October meeting at the IMF gathering in Bangkok.
Why it matters
IPO valuations are public scorecards: they show what price investors will pay for a dollar of revenue when growth starts to slow. If Anthropic — the company behind Claude and the largest AI listing expected this year — is framed closer to $1.5 trillion than $2 trillion even after $16.8 billion of quarterly revenue, that implies a lower revenue multiple than the market once assumed, at the same moment investors are questioning how the AI industry funds its infrastructure commitments.
What happens next
The November share sale remains the plan, but the reported discussions suggest public investors will demand more evidence — and likely a lower entry price — before backing the AI buildout at scale. The $1.5 trillion figure reflects investor discussions, not a set price. How Anthropic’s sale prices will define whether the AI trade’s financing anxiety is a wobble or a repricing.
