US stocks shed $2.5 trillion in a single day; Anthropic IPO valuation reportedly cut to $500 billion

US stocks crashed overnight, and Anthropic's valuation has plummeted to 500 billion! Pursuing ASI could land you 20 years in prison. Xinzhiyuan November 06, 2026 11:59:41 From Beijing Updated November 06, 2026 13:49:12

When we woke up this morning, countless people's WeChat Moments and group chats were flooded with screens full of "plunge" and "crash."

Everyone was spreading the word: last night, US stocks suffered an epic bloodbath.

In just 40 minutes, the market value of the S&P 500 instantly evaporated by 2.5 trillion dollars!

This was one of the fastest and most brutal wealth destruction moments in the history of the US stock market.

And Anthropic's IPO is also in jeopardy!

Now, Anthropic's IPO valuation has dropped from 2 trillion dollars to 1.5 trillion dollars, and the valuation may even be further cut to 1 trillion dollars, or even the rumored 500 billion!

It has simply been cut off at the ankles.

Worse still, US tech stocks evaporated 2.5 trillion overnight, and whether Anthropic can even IPO is now a question.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged 1,833.06 points, a drop of 3.44%.

The tech stock sell-off was like a bursting dam, and the combined market value of the "Magnificent Seven" tech giants evaporated by more than 1 trillion dollars!

Looking at individual stocks, the former darlings that once shone brightly have all fallen from grace.

This morning, the storm crossed the Pacific directly, and South Korea's KOSPI opened down nearly 9%, directly triggering a circuit breaker and halting all trading.

A screen full of blood red, everything falling together.

The day before yesterday, US stocks were still celebrating the resolution of the midterm elections, with the Dow surging 1,500 points; just 24 hours later, the Dow reversed and plunged 1,833 points in a single day, wiping out all gains instantly. So dramatic.

Nvidia plunged 9.26%, evaporating more than 440 billion dollars in a single day, with its year-to-date gains nearly wiped out;

AMD plunged 15%, Micron plunged 17%, SanDisk plunged 22%;

Qualcomm fell nearly 9.5%.

Soaring memory chip costs are severely eroding profits.

The two computing power leasing giants suffered a bloodbath: CoreWeave plunged 10%, down 76% from last year's high; Nebius plunged 15%, halved by 58% from this year's high. Even energy stocks responsible for power supply, GE Vernova and Constellation Energy, were also hit by fierce selling.

Musk's Tesla plunged nearly 11%, SpaceX fell more than 9%, and concerns that AI training center expansion is being blocked spread rapidly.

Once this logic is broken, the entire industrial chain will be overturned!

Anthropic's shocking bombshell: an 895 billion dollar debt black hole, valuation slashed from 2 trillion to an "ankle cut"

Originally, Anthropic was held up to the skies by Wall Street and regarded as the ballast for global tech stocks in 2026.

A few days ago, market expectations for its IPO valuation were still clamoring for 2 trillion dollars.

However, the latest disclosed data directly stunned the major Wall Street investment banks:

Anthropic carries up to 895 billion dollars in irrevocable computing power and infrastructure spending commitments!

What does that mean?

Among all US tech giants, apart from Google parent Alphabet's 1.06 trillion dollar commitment, Anthropic's bill directly surpasses Meta's (866 billion dollars), crushing all of Silicon Valley.

This means that even if the company earns not a single cent tomorrow, it must grit its teeth and pay this astronomical bill. Among them:

Broadcom: 161 billion dollars;

Google: 121 billion dollars, plus up to 150 billion dollars in AI chip procurement commitments;

In the next 12 months alone, Anthropic must pay out a full 70 billion dollars in real money; by the end of 2030, it will have to spend 448 billion dollars.

Can it earn that much money?

Although third-quarter revenue surged 47% to 17 billion dollars, the bottomless pit of large model R&D and massive depreciation are causing its net loss to expand at astronomical figures.

Just a few days ago, it was still dreaming of an IPO with a 2 trillion dollar market value; the target valuation quickly halved to 1.5 trillion, then 1 trillion, and rumors even say that in private transactions someone has offered an ultra-low "ankle cut" quote of 500 billion dollars.

Anthropic faces a huge crisis

According to data from prediction market platform Kalshi, the probability of Anthropic going public in 2026 has plunged from nearly 90% before the midterm elections to less than 60%.

A former Morgan Stanley employee and Silicon Valley partner said bluntly: the valuation cut doesn't matter at all, because the game may already be over.

He pointed out that the entire existence of Anthropic (and similar AI giants) is built on a financing model of "extreme asset-liability mismatch."

This is essentially a "reflexivity trap of a confidence game."

Simply put: AI companies need to continuously buy computing power from hyperscale data centers (such as Amazon and Google). To pay for it, they must continuously raise funds and issue new shares at extremely high valuations. This model can only be sustained as long as stock prices keep soaring.

But once the IPO is mispriced, or the stock market environment deteriorates, the death spiral begins.

Without high-valuation equity, they cannot borrow money; without credit, they cannot pay the computing power bills; if they cannot pay the computing power bills, the company cannot survive, because that nearly trillion-dollar irrevocable commitment is a fatal negative asset mortgage.

"If credit rating agencies won't rate $2 trillion in investment-grade bonds, they absolutely won't rate $1 trillion in junk bonds."

Under these circumstances, Anthropic's path to a smooth IPO faces an extremely severe make-or-break test.

If it forces a roadshow, it may suffer the embarrassment of attracting no interest; if it delays, next year's $70 billion bill will soon be overdue.

The newly elected governor made a clear stance during the campaign: impose a temporary ban on high-energy-consumption data centers and cancel all tax breaks for data center operators.

Over the past two years, global tech giants have been buying up land and building factories here, with the supercomputing centers of Google, Meta, Oracle, and OpenAI clustered in the area. AI models are getting bigger and bigger, and their power consumption is becoming more and more terrifying.

Now, the reckoning has come.

This time the market is not cutting down the "shovel users," but specifically cutting down the "shovel sellers."

In the past, capital believed that as long as chips could be made and machine rooms could be built, the future would surely be monetized. Now, when the giants are carrying nearly a trillion-dollar bill and machine room approvals are blocked by policy, Wall Street has begun to settle the accounts:

With these hundreds of billions of dollars poured into the ground, apart from pretty PPTs, when exactly will real commercial returns be seen?

Less than 24 hours after the election results came out, Arizona Democratic Representative Yassamin Ansari openly declared war on the entire AI industry:

This tweet quickly surpassed 14 million views, and Musk immediately retweeted it with sarcasm: "Brave New World indeed."

Unexpectedly, Ansari, holding the new congressional majority, directly confronted Musk head-on, dropping a highly charged warning: "We'll meet in Congress soon."

The reason Silicon Valley and Wall Street are completely panicked is that Ansari is by no means just shouting slogans.

The "Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act" (No. S.5493 / H.R.10538) she co-sponsored is long past being merely a verbal proposal.

As early as September this year, this bill was formally submitted to Congress by Senator Sanders and Representative Khanna.

Opening the text of this bill, there are three iron-fisted clauses enough to uproot Silicon Valley:

The first cut ostensibly regulates the "future" but actually cuts the "present."

The bill stipulates that as long as training compute exceeds 10²⁵ floating-point operations, a "mandatory pause order" is automatically triggered—without approval from the newly established federal "Department of AI," training, fine-tuning, and even market release are strictly prohibited.

You should know that, as early as three years ago, the first-generation GPT-4 had already crossed this threshold!

This means that the next-generation flagship models currently being run by major Silicon Valley labs have all been on the illegal red line from the moment the machine rooms were powered on.

The second cut completely welds shut the ceiling for "superintelligence."

The third cut directly treats large model research and development as a "felony."

Once the line is crossed, the tech companies involved will be directly ordered by the federal government to disband; engineers and executives face up to 20 years in federal prison!

All of X instantly exploded.

Well-known tech investor Jen Zhu said, "Just ban linear algebra, probability and statistics, and vector calculus as well!"

Wall Street traders were even more furious, harshly criticizing politicians for "single-handedly crashing the entire US stock market with one tweet."

Macro institutions have also warned that hitting the brakes now is tantamount to "destroying the Great Wall yourself."

If the next-generation large models cannot be trained, then so many GPUs will not be needed.

If GPUs are not needed, then so much HBM and storage will not be needed; if chips are not bought at all, then naturally there is no need to build data centers.

You should know that AI is the only reason US GDP can still maintain positive growth.