Is Anthropic About To Delay The Biggest IPO Ever?

Backers want a lower price, the November timetable is in doubt, and executives and advisers are set to meet to review the deal…

Major institutional backers are pushing Anthropic to cut the $1.5 trillion valuation it had been targeting for its IPO, and one suggested pricing could fall closer to $1 trillion, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday, after the Nasdaq Composite lost $2.5 trillion of market value in a single session.

Anthropic had aimed to raise up to $100 billion around the week before Thanksgiving, which would top SpaceX’s June listing as the largest offering ever. According to the Journal, executives and advisers plan to meet in the coming days to review the IPO, and backers are debating whether to adjust the price range or push back the timeline. With a mountain of cash on hand, the company can afford to shrink the raise or wait.

Potential investors doubt Anthropic can complete its roadshow the week after next and still list in November, four people familiar with the discussions told Reuters. The roadshow had been expected to start the week of Nov. 9, with pricing the week after. Some now see $1.5 trillion as the high end of expectations, and Anthropic may need to offer a bigger discount because of its record of quarterly losses and its huge commitments to partners in the AI buildout. If the pressure on AI-related assets continues, the company could postpone until markets look sturdier, the sources said. Anthropic declined to comment.

Investors are also waiting on Anthropic’s October revenue, which was left blank in its updated S-1, to see whether growth has recovered from its recent slowdown, two of the sources told Reuters.

The valuation has been marked down once already. After Anthropic told investors in October that third-quarter revenue grew 45% from the second quarter, down from more than doubling the quarter before, IPO investors marked it down from about $2 trillion to $1.5 trillion, as we reported.

Tech stocks suffered their sharpest selloff in a year after Tuesday’s midterms handed Democrats the House and Senate, a blue wave that knocked the market’s teeth in. The Journal tied the retreat to AI-skeptical lawmakers and local data center moratoriums; Reuters pointed to ballot efforts in many states to limit data center development. Meta president Dina Powell McCormick said Wednesday that building data centers will be “harder following the election results,” Yahoo Finance reported.

Prediction markets have cut the odds of a November listing. On Polymarket, the odds of an Anthropic IPO by Nov. 30 fell from 84% to 58%, and by Dec. 31 from 90% to 73%…

In private markets, OpenAI has secured only $11 billion of the $30 billion it targeted in its latest round, at an adjusted $1.25 trillion valuation, according to the Journal.

As for those commitments, this week’s amended filing put Anthropic’s committed spend at $895.4 billion, more than $1 trillion all-in…

…, with $69.8 billion due in the next 12 months…

Buyers would also inherit Anthropic’s philanthropy. Anthropic has already put 5% of its fully diluted stock into its own Anthropic Public Benefit Fund, managed initially by CEO Dario Amodei, his sister Daniela, Jack Clark and Buddy Shah, and the board may add up to another 2% every time the stock rises 50%. The co-founders, who stand to be worth hundreds of billions after the IPO, have each pledged 80% of their personal equity to charity. The employee donation-matching program alone produced a $2.0 billion non-cash charge in the third quarter, one of the two items that pushed Anthropic back to an operating loss.

And whoever buys in won’t get much say. As we detailed when Anthropic’s S-1 landed last month, a single Class F share owned by the seven co-founders carries 50.1% of the vote, the Long-Term Benefit Trust elects a majority of the board, and public shareholders will never hold more than 49.9% of the vote, one of the 10 biggest red flags we found in the filing.