The tech industry needs this to proceed smoothly, and the same goes for Wall Street.
Anthropic Submit the IPO file on Monday, enabling the developers of this Claude to advance what could become the largest initial public offering in history. Investors are already making calculations based on the trillions of dollars in market value that this five-year-old company could achieve, putting it among the world's most valuable corporations.
This is a critical moment for the entire tech sector, as the artificial intelligence boom is largely driven by two companies: Anthropic and OpenAI. The latter has secretly submitted its listing application, but it is likely that its public debut will not occur until 2027 at the earliest.
At the same time, signs of concern in the stock market regarding AI transactions are beginning to emerge. Neoclouds and data center companies have recently suffered heavy losses, prompting Australia's Firmus to withdraw its IPO plan. SK SK Hynix' US business, Solidigm, has made the same decision as well.
Today, all eyes are turned towards Anthropic. The company is betting that investors will overlook its losses of over $80 billion in the first half of this year, and see a 14-fold increase in revenue as evidence of its leading model and seemingly endless demand for its services.
"If its performance falls short of expectations, it could be a bit like a house of cards," said Jai Das, co-founder of Sapphire Ventures. Das has been working in the field of tech investment since the 1990s.
The business of Anthropic is deeply intertwined with that of technology giants. Nearly half of its revenue comes from selling Claude through the cloud services of Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet. All three of these companies hold investments in Anthropic. In this IPO, Anthropic can issue approximately $77 billion in bonds to Amazon, Broadcom, and Google; at the same time, Microsoft and NVIDIA have agreed to invest $15 billion to help the company expand its computing power. Chips from NVIDIA, AMD, Amazon, and Google are supporting the research and development of Anthropic.
Cloud service providers are increasing their capital expenditures to meet demand, and storage chip manufacturers are also competing for production capacity to supply AI chips preferentially. Debt factors are also a concern. Alphabet, which has an investment-grade credit rating, has committed to supporting a data center of Anthropic in Texas. Broadcom's CEO, Hock Tan, stated earlier this year to analysts that the company is creating a financing pool to help Anthropic and OpenAI deploy high-performance models; Broadcom is also assisting Google in developing chips for AI laboratories.
For public market investors, more than one-third of the market value of the S&P 500 index comes from technology giants, which are all deeply involved in AI to varying degrees. In addition, software giants such as Adobe and Salesforce have also completed integration with the Claude assistants of Anthropic.
Market reset?
In the private equity market, the scale of checks has expanded, but there are very few IPO. Both Bessemer Venture Partners and Menlo Ventures have indicated to CNBC that Anthropic is their largest investment to date.
"If they perform poorly, they will become a barometer for AI," said Brad Bernstein, the managing partner of growth equity firm FTV Capital. "Their valuations will reflect these performance differences, and then this will have a chain reaction on the excess capital flooding into the venture capital AI sector. Everything will have to be re-priced."
Following Saudi Aramco and Elon Musk's SpaceX, Anthropic will become the third company to go public with a market value of over $1 trillion; SpaceX went public in June. OpenAI may become the fourth.
As companies adopt the company's programming and productivity tools, the revenue of Anthropic is growing at an astonishing rate. Revenue in the second quarter soared from $787 million a year ago to $11.56 billion.
As of the end of June, the company held nearly $132 billion in cash, cash equivalents, and short-term investments. After experiencing operating losses for five consecutive quarters, Anthropic announced operating revenue of $974 million for the second quarter.
Burnham Park Capital Markets, partner and chief AI official Rohit Kulkarni said when discussing these financial figures: "I think it's better than people are worried about." "There could have been even more negative details."
One source of concern for some investors is the emergence of so-called open-source weighting models. These models are cheaper for companies and also allow for customization and flexible deployment in terms of where the models can be accessed.
In the prospectus, the only two competitors listed by Anthropic are OpenAI and Google, but the company stated that it also faces competition from “a wider range of model providers,” which includes open-source models.
Anthropic indicates that we are still in a very early stage. In the most recent quarter, the spending of Fortune 500 companies on their models and services was less than 0.1% of their total expenses. Founder ETFs Portfolio Manager Michael Monaghan stated that this is indeed part of the investment logic.
"I believe that cutting-edge model companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX will have room to survive, as will open-source weight models," said Monaghan. "It's really too early to assert that one will replace the other at this point."
As the spending of hyperscale cloud providers on AI infrastructure is expected to reach trillions of dollars, Sapphire's Das suggests that concerns about oversupply in the market are understandable. However, he compares it to the telecommunications and internet bubble at the end of the 1990s, when companies flooded the market with fiber optic equipment. In the end, all that infrastructure was put to use, despite many companies going bankrupt during that period.
“In the long run, I don’t think there will be a shortage of demand,” said Das.
Downside risks
If the debut performance is mediocre, it may further delay the listing of OpenAI and prompt investors to re-evaluate its high valuation. At the same time, rising interest rates mean that companies face higher costs for borrowing and financing.
The chief executive officer of financial research firm New Constructs, David Trainer, wrote in a report last month that the AI craze was based on the notion that cheap credit and access to capital markets would be “within easy reach.”
"If AI experiences a depletion of liquidity, and the signs are already quite clear, we believe the S&P 500 will face a significant 20% downside risk. Most of this risk will be concentrated on the valuations of AI related stocks," writes Trainer.
Industry experts, on the other hand, take a different perspective, focusing on the power of this technology and its rapid spread. Claude Opus 5.5 Max performs better than any other model on industry benchmarks Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index.
Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy stated that this technology will only become more and more important.
“Anthropic and OpenAI have so far proven their ability to be at the forefront of AI and to continuously drive innovation,” said Ramaswamy. “They are remarkable companies that have made significant contributions to expanding the boundaries of what is possible for humanity. We very much hope that they will go public and become highly successful companies.”
However, Snowflake is also experimenting with low-cost open-source weight models from China's Moonshot AI, DeepSeek, and Zhipu.
"We invest a lot in the internal AI, because we want to improve efficiency as much as possible," said Ramaswamy.
Watch: As indicated by Rick Heitzmann of FirstMark, it seems that Anthropic will IPO earlier than OpenAI.
