Anthropic prepares for IPO amid market decline: valuation could fall below $1.5 trillion

Anthropic moves toward listing despite market turbulence

Anthropic, despite a recent major sell-off day on Nasdaq, continues preparing for its stock market debut. As reported by The Wall Street Journal, the company plans to set a valuation range this week, with trading possibly beginning on Thursday or Friday of next week. TechCrunch, summarizing the WSJ report, notes that a major tech company going public in current conditions looks like a risky move; the outlet also mentions reports that the company's chief, who plays a key role in the AI boom, was involved in a romance with an alleged Chinese spy — this information is presented as a press report, not an established fact.

The valuation is falling, and the market is benchmarking it against the state of the entire AI sector

The key question of the offering will be the final valuation. According to WSJ, as recently as last week a benchmark of $1.5 trillion was being discussed — and that was already noticeably below the $2 trillion figure floated a few months ago. Now some institutional investors are pushing for a valuation below even that level. For investors, Anthropic's valuation serves as an indicator of the durability of the entire AI boom: to a large extent, it will determine how the market prices the capitalization of the sector's companies overall.

Context: the valuation of rival OpenAI

For comparison: Anthropic's main rival, OpenAI, was reportedly valued last week at $1.25 trillion after raising $11 billion in new capital — noticeably less than the $20 billion the company had originally hoped to raise. If institutional investors succeed in pushing Anthropic's valuation below $1.5 trillion, the gap between the two leading AI companies will be smaller than earlier benchmarks suggested; however, the final figure will only become known once the range is set and trading begins.