Anthropic Files IPO Prospectus; US Media Say Its Listing Will Test the Entire AI Industry

Anthropic's star product Claude

Anthropic developed the Claude chatbot and is one of the pillars of the artificial intelligence industry. The company's valuation in the private market has approached $1 trillion, with cumulative funding exceeding $130 billion. This IPO could raise $100 billion, quickly propelling it into the ranks of the world's most valuable listed companies. But the stakes go even further than that.

One move affects the whole body

Anthropic and its main competitor OpenAI sit atop a vast pyramid of business partners and suppliers. These companies include infrastructure providers, chip manufacturers, energy companies and artificial intelligence startups. Over the past four years, they have all invested enormous sums because they believe demand for artificial intelligence products will continue to grow.

Anthropic's listing will, for the first time, give the outside world an in-depth look at the operating conditions of a key company underpinning the AI boom, and will also test the sustainability of that boom. Is demand for artificial intelligence services truly endless, enough to support the massive corporate investment in chips, data centers and other infrastructure? Or will Anthropic's results show that such demand ultimately has a ceiling?

"For the market, it is a bellwether," said Umesh Padval, an investor at venture capital firm Seligman Ventures, who has worked in the tech industry for nearly 40 years.

If Anthropic's trading debut disappoints, it could hit investor confidence and trigger a broader market selloff, raising doubts about how much longer the AI boom can last. Conversely, if the IPO succeeds, it could lift the market and pave the way for more AI companies to go public.

The stock market is already in a nervous state. This month, tech stocks fell broadly, with companies that design and manufacture AI chips leading the decline. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index has fallen 26% from its June high, entering a bear market, indicating that investor anxiety is already quite severe.

In recent weeks, Microsoft canceled a partnership agreement with data center supplier Nscale. A report published by research firm Gartner predicted that 80% of "neoclouds" (companies that provide data and computing power to AI companies) may be forced out of the market. In addition, Ken Griffin, the billionaire founder of hedge fund Citadel, said AI investors are "almost certainly" in a bubble.

Meta data center

These negative signals have further intensified market concerns about massive spending on AI infrastructure. Amazon, Meta, Google and Microsoft have all said they plan to invest at least $740 billion this year in AI infrastructure, including data centers. According to investment data tracker PitchBook, since 2022, private market investors have put $1.1 trillion into Anthropic, OpenAI and other AI companies.

As spending and investment in the private market continue to increase, the scale of investment in the public market is also expanding, making stock market performance increasingly dependent on the performance of the AI industry. The top 10 companies by market value in the S&P 500 have a combined market value of more than $1 trillion, and eight of them are tech companies. Together, these 10 companies account for more than 40% of the index's weight, compared with less than 20% a decade ago.

In the future, after Anthropic is included in the index, it will likely push Berkshire Hathaway or Eli Lilly out of the top 10. Those two companies are currently the only non-tech companies with market values exceeding $1 trillion.

"This listing is a big deal. If it doesn't go well, the entire market will be dragged down," said Brad Gastwirth, global head of research and market intelligence at supply chain services company Circular Technology.

Growth slows

Anthropic filed its IPO prospectus on Monday, disclosing details of its rapid revenue growth and plans to invest up to $807 billion over the next decade in data centers, chips and cloud computing.

The document did not include Anthropic's third-quarter performance data. The company disclosed those figures to investors this month at its San Francisco headquarters. Anthropic's third-quarter revenue reached $16.8 billion, up 45% quarter over quarter. But investors noted that the company's second-quarter revenue grew 141% from the first quarter, a far faster pace than in the third quarter.

How Anthropic explains this slowdown will be crucial. If the reason is that the company lost market share to OpenAI or to companies using lower-cost open-source AI models, that means overall demand for AI services remains solid. But if Anthropic's growth slowdown is because demand for AI products across the market has weakened, the market reaction could be more severe.

Anthropic San Francisco headquarters

Over the past year, Anthropic has been the hottest company in Silicon Valley, thanks in part to Claude Code. This service has changed the way software engineers write code. As the company's revenue soared, private market investors kept pushing up its valuation, bringing it to $965 billion and surpassing OpenAI.

The IPO market is cooling

To meet market demand for its AI products, Anthropic struck agreements worth hundreds of billions of dollars to rent computing power from Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. It is also investing money in Nvidia's chips and in data centers run by companies such as Nscale. The businesses that provide services to Anthropic, in turn, are also pouring huge sums into their own suppliers.

But this summer, some Anthropic customers concluded that they were spending too much on "tokens" (the units of data that AI systems process and generate). They began looking for cheaper options. Meta, one of Anthropic's largest customers, had projected spending as much as $10 billion a year on the company's technology this year, but it cut back spending as it shifted to other AI models.

Shares of some AI companies that went public this year have already fallen sharply. Shares of Silicon Valley AI chipmaker Cerebras are down about 40% from their May offering price. Shares of AI infrastructure company Accelevation are now about one-third below their September offering price of $18. After SpaceX, owned by Musk, went public in June, its shares have also fallen sharply from their peak, though they are still about 9% above the offering price.

Against this backdrop, the pace of the IPO market has slowed. Holtec, which supplies nuclear power to the AI industry, withdrew its listing application last month. SB Energy, the data center company of SoftBank, one of OpenAI's largest backers, as well as Aggreko, a power company that works with data centers, have also postponed their listing plans.

Matthew Kennedy, a senior strategist at Renaissance Capital, which tracks listing activity, said AI infrastructure was the "number one theme" of this year's IPO market, "but it has also been one of the sectors hit hardest in the sell-off of the past few weeks."

Investment bankers have warned companies that they may not be able to obtain the valuations being considered two months ago. David Solomon, CEO of Goldman Sachs, said on an earnings call this month that although the public offering market is "completely open," companies may choose to hold off on going public if they still hope to obtain valuations close to those discussed this summer. "The market softened somewhat in September," he said.

Anthropic's revenue figures have further deepened market doubts. Previously, the market expected the company to be valued at up to $2 trillion when it goes public. But according to a person familiar with the matter, after seeing slowing revenue growth and continued market weakness, some investors have begun discussing a valuation range of $1.5 trillion to $1.7 trillion.

AI industry executives have been working to reassure the market. This month, C.C. Wei, CEO of TSMC, which supplies chips to the AI industry, said the company's profit growth has "no ceiling."

Late last week, stocks fell further as concerns about AI spending intensified. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite Index posted its largest one-day decline since June.