Anthropic’s IPO Stares Down a Wobbly AI Trade

Anthropic is getting a haircut for its imminent IPO, but it’s not quite the look they’d been hoping for. 

Reports surfaced earlier this month that the Claude-maker and frontier AI lab may lower its target valuation, from $2 trillion to $1.5 trillion, amid concerns of slowing revenue growth and a broader AI bubble in the lead up to its likely IPO next month. The 25% reduction would still leave Anthropic as the third largest IPO ever, behind Saudi Aramco’s $1.7 trillion 2019 launch and the nearly $1.8 trillion SpaceX IPO earlier this year. That’d be a relative bummer for the company’s latest-stage investors, who backed the company at a nearly $1 trillion valuation back in May. Even worse, it may just be another delay across the finish line.

Scratched and Claude

If the valuation trim increases the public’s appetite for Anthropic shares as intended, its many early investors will make out like gangbusters. For instance, Spark Capital’s $75 million investment in 2023 is now worth $7 billion at the company’s current valuation, sources told Bloomberg last week. The $1 billion that Menlo Ventures has poured into the company across multiple rounds now carries a paper value of $14 billion. Former Google executive Eric Schmidt reportedly took a 1% stake after investing some tens of millions of dollars as an angel investor all the way back in 2021. Ditto Sam “FTX” Bankman-Fried. Major tech players including Google, Nvidia, Amazon and SK Hynix all have a literal vested interest in a successful debut as well.

The sentiment is shared over on Wall Street. The banks took home $500 million in underwriting fees from the SpaceX IPO earlier this year, and a similarly sized pool is likely in play this time around. Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, in the premier lead-left and stabilization agent roles, respectively, could earn a big chunk of that. 

Anthropic, meanwhile, is eager to raise more money on the public market. For what? What else? Compute, compute and more compute:

• Anthropic has told investors that it spent $9 billion on compute and infrastructure in the first half of the year, according to the company’s S-1 obtained by The Wall Street Journal last week. That’s more than the $7.3 billion it spent on compute all of 2025. 
• The company has also told investors that it’s lined up $450 billion in cloud computing agreements through the next decade, a bill that could grow to $750 billion. Anthropic is hoping to raise between $60 billion and $100 billion in its IPO.

Altman Awaits: Waiting in the wings, of course, is OpenAI, planning an IPO of its own sometime early next year. Though the rival firm is hardly waiting around. Reports surfaced last week that OpenAI is close to securing one more private funding round, worth some $30 billion and valuing the company at $1.2 trillion. That’s a haircut, too: The Financial Times reported that OpenAI initially asked for a $1.4 trillion valuation in its pitch meetings.