Anthropic’s potential initial public offering is facing an early test of investor appetite, with some prospective and existing investors reportedly considering a valuation of around $1.5 trillion, below the roughly $2 trillion target previously expected for its November listing.
The reassessment follows a slowdown in the company’s sequential revenue growth and comes as investors grow increasingly concerned about the cost of financing artificial intelligence infrastructure.
A lower valuation could create pressure across AI-related stocks, particularly companies exposed to the enormous spending commitments of leading AI developers.
Shares and bonds of Nvidia-backed data centre operator CoreWeave have already come under pressure amid concerns about debt-funded AI expansion.
However, a reduction in Anthropic’s expected IPO valuation does not necessarily mean the AI investment boom is ending.
Investors must distinguish between concerns about how much leading AI developers are worth and whether demand for AI computing continues to grow.
Anthropic reported third-quarter revenue of $16.8 billion, up 45% from the previous quarter, and said it was profitable on an adjusted basis.
The figures demonstrate substantial growth, even as some investors question whether the company’s valuation adequately reflects its slowing growth rate and significant future spending requirements.
Anthropic’s $2 trillion IPO target faces investor resistance
According to a Reuters report citing people familiar with the matter, some current and prospective Anthropic investors discussed a valuation of approximately $1.5 trillion during the company’s investor day in San Francisco on Wednesday.
That would represent a $500 billion reduction from the roughly $2 trillion valuation investors had previously expected for the planned November share sale.
The discussions followed disclosures that Anthropic’s revenue growth had slowed sequentially in the third quarter.
Revenue more than doubled from the first quarter to $11.6 billion in the second quarter, before rising 45% to $16.8 billion in the third quarter.
Although the latest growth remained substantial, the deceleration disappointed some investors who had expected the company to sustain its earlier momentum.
Anthropic’s financial performance is particularly important because the company has committed to enormous infrastructure spending.
According to the company’s IPO prospectus, it has pledged to spend at least $518 billion over a decade on cloud services, computing and infrastructure, Reuters had reported in September.
The prospectus also showed a loss of $42 billion in 2025 and projected further spending for the upcoming AI buildout.
Last year, revenue surged twelvefold to nearly $4.6 billion, while the company recorded an operating loss exceeding $8 billion, excluding certain liability write-downs.
These figures highlight the challenge facing investors: Anthropic is growing rapidly, but its future value depends partly on its ability to turn that growth into sustainable financial returns while meeting substantial computing costs.
A lower IPO valuation could therefore reflect a reassessment of the price investors are willing to pay for that growth, rather than a rejection of the company’s business altogether.
Slowing growth does not necessarily signal weak AI demand
The central question is whether Anthropic’s slower sequential growth reflects weakening demand for AI or increasing competition from alternative providers.
One possibility is that customers are shifting spending towards competitors, including OpenAI, which launched its Astra model in early September, or other AI services.
Meta Platforms could also capture a larger share of the market.
Such a shift would not necessarily be negative for the broader AI industry.
If overall spending continues to increase, one provider’s slower growth could be offset by stronger demand elsewhere.
The more concerning possibility would be that businesses are reducing their AI investments altogether.
However, available usage data suggests that adoption continues to expand.
OpenRouter, a start-up that helps developers route requests across AI models, reported that weekly token consumption reached 172 trillion as of the previous week, up from 46.7 trillion at the end of June.
Tokens are the basic units of text and other data processed by AI models.
Wedbush Securities analyst Matt Bryson also argued that Anthropic’s results should not automatically be interpreted as evidence of slowing AI spending.
In a note to clients, Bryson said annualising revenue trends over very short periods can be misleading, particularly when based on indirect reports.
He also pointed to increased competition from alternatives to Anthropic, including Muse and Copilot, while noting that Anthropic still achieved 45% sequential revenue growth.
Bryson added that Wedbush had not seen indications of slowing hardware demand.
He cited rising GPU rental prices, including for older systems, and said concerns about financing costs and foundation-model growth did not appear to be affecting AI demand or supply-chain dynamics.
Cheaper AI models could benefit cloud and infrastructure firms
Another explanation for Anthropic’s slower growth is the increasing use of open AI models, which are generally less expensive and can be adapted for more efficient applications.
Improvements in hardware efficiency can also reduce the cost of processing AI tokens.
This creates a potential shift in how value is distributed across the AI industry.
Anthropic and OpenAI spend heavily on developing advanced, or frontier, models.
If customers increasingly turn to cheaper alternatives, these developers could face pressure to justify their spending and valuations.
Cloud providers and companies supplying computing infrastructure, however, could still benefit from rising overall usage.
Amazon, Microsoft and Alphabet’s Google operate cloud businesses that can host a range of AI models.
Greater use of open models could generate additional demand for their computing services without requiring them to share the revenue generated by developing those models.
Gavin Baker, chief investment officer of Atreides Management, said in a post on X on Thursday that
“Open-source growing much faster than either Anthropic or OpenAI. Modal tripled since May and is 15x YoY per yesterday’s announcement. Open-source tokens generate more revenue and profit for the hyperscalers/neoclouds than frontier tokens. *Every* open source inference cloud I am aware of is growing faster both sequentially and YoY than either Anthropic or OpenAI. And their combined compute spend is becoming material.”
The argument points to a potential divergence within the AI trade.
Investors may become more selective about which companies capture the financial benefits of growing AI adoption, rather than treating all AI-linked businesses as beneficiaries of the same investment cycle.
Nevertheless, the distinction should not be overstated.
Anthropic and OpenAI remain important sources of spending on cloud computing, chips and networking equipment.
A sharp deterioration in their financial prospects could still affect the companies supplying their infrastructure.
The open AI models also remain heavily influenced by Chinese providers, despite efforts by Meta and Nvidia to strengthen the position of US-developed alternatives.
What a lower Anthropic valuation could mean for AI investors
A scaled-back IPO valuation could weigh on sentiment if investors interpret it as evidence that expectations for AI growth have become excessive.
The concern is particularly relevant amid a broader technology selloff that has hurt chipmakers, AI infrastructure companies and neocloud providers.
CoreWeave’s recent share and bond declines illustrate the market’s sensitivity to the financing requirements of the AI buildout.
A disappointing Anthropic listing could add to concerns about whether the sector’s enormous spending commitments can generate sufficient returns.
Anthropic’s IPO is also important because investors increasingly view the anticipated listing, followed by a potential OpenAI offering, as a test of demand for major AI companies in public markets.
Yet a lower valuation could also represent a more cautious pricing of future growth, rather than the collapse of the AI investment thesis.
At $1.5 trillion, Anthropic would still command an enormous valuation for a company founded in 2021.
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