Investors Trim Anthropic IPO Valuation Hopes to $1.5 Trillion

Investors Discuss $1.5 Trillion Valuation

Some existing shareholders in Anthropic, and prospective participants in its planned initial public offering (IPO), are now working with a company valuation of about $1.5 trillion, below the roughly $2 trillion they had pencilled in for the November listing. Four people familiar with the discussions described the shift, which follows the company's latest financial disclosures and comes as concern grows over the ballooning cost of funding AI development.

The recalibration traces to an investor meeting Anthropic held at its San Francisco headquarters on Wednesday, October 14. At that session, the company told investors weighing participation in the IPO that third-quarter revenue reached $16.8 billion, a 45% increase from the prior quarter, and that it was profitable on an adjusted basis for the quarter. Attendees, most of them major shareholders, met chief executive Dario Amodei and chief financial officer Krishna Rao.

In absolute terms the quarter was strong. Revenue rose by more than $5 billion sequentially, and cumulative revenue for the first three quarters of this year stands at about $33.1 billion, far above the roughly $4.6 billion the company booked across all of 2025. The pace, though, is the sticking point. Second-quarter revenue had been $11.6 billion, more than double the first quarter, so the 45% sequential gain in the third quarter marks a clear deceleration, and several investors said they were disappointed by it. The people who described the talks spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly. Anthropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The company's track record frames the debate. Revenue climbed to nearly $4.6 billion last year, twelve times the prior year, while operating losses, stripping out accounting effects tied mainly to past fundraising, exceeded $8 billion. Anthropic reported a net loss of $42 billion for 2025 and told investors it expects to spend even more on AI infrastructure ahead. Founded in 2021 by former OpenAI executives including Dario Amodei and his sibling Daniela Amodei, now president, the company turned its Claude models into one of the leading generative AI franchises, with Google and Amazon acting as backers, compute suppliers and major sales partners even as both compete in AI.

CoreWeave Yields Near 15%

The valuation talk lands in a market already repricing AI risk. Anthropic has committed to spend at least $518 billion over ten years on cloud services, computing power and infrastructure, a promise that keeps investor attention fixed on whether revenue can expand fast enough to fund it. Adjusted profitability, while welcome, does not by itself prove cash generation can cover that outlay; IPO buyers are also weighing the adjustments behind the profit figure and the company's compute bill.

Credit conditions are tightening around the sector. CoreWeave, the Nvidia-backed neocloud that leases AI computing capacity, saw its shares tumble at points during Thursday's session and its bond prices fall as well. Yields on a batch of its 2032 bonds climbed from about 13.42% in early October to roughly 15% by October 14, and market pricing on Oracle's unsecured bonds has weakened too. The higher yields are not a default signal or a downgrade; they show lenders demanding more compensation for risk from companies that must buy chips and data centers first and collect revenue later.

The equity side is equally cautious. OpenAI, Anthropic's chief rival, has already slowed its own listing timeline: chief executive Sam Altman has ruled out an IPO in 2026, saying the company must first address AI safety, alignment and governance questions, with a debut possible from 2027. That makes Anthropic's November listing, if it prices this year, the industry's gauge of how much appetite exists for AI shares at all.

Recent IPO windows offer little comfort. Data center operator SB Energy postponed its offering last month, and nuclear technology firm Holtec Nuclear withdrew its listing plans entirely. A lackluster Anthropic debut would add pressure across the AI infrastructure complex, from chipmakers to neoclouds, whose equity and debt have both sold off as investors question the sector's growing reliance on borrowed money.

Our own reading of Anthropic pre-IPO shares shows the last price at $1,940.48, up 1.22% over 24 hours and sitting near the top of a $1,770.19 to $2,008.90 range. The daily trend remains a downtrend, with a relative strength reading of 44.4 and a bearish MACD signal, so the bounce has not yet repaired the larger structure. The nearest resistance sits at $1,963.48, scored 72 out of 100 on COINOTAG's composite, just above the last price, while the strongest support is $1,801.40, a Fibonacci retracement level scored 98 out of 100. Perpetual futures open interest stands at $45.7 million with funding at 0.0025%. Until the $1,963.48 band gives way, positioning keeps trading inside the downtrend.