Dario Amodei, co-founder and CEO of Anthropic, speaks during a panel discussion at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on January 23, 2025.
Stefan Vermes | Bloomberg | Getty Images
The technology industry needs this to succeed. The same goes for Wall Street.
Anthropic’s IPO filing on Monday positions Claude’s creator to pursue what could be the largest initial public offering in history. Investors are already pegging the five-year-old company’s potential market capitalization in the trillions, making it one of the world’s most valuable companies.
This is a critical moment for the entire technology industry, as the artificial intelligence boom has been primarily driven by two companies: Anthropic and OpenAI. The latter has secretly filed to go public, but said its debut likely won’t happen until 2027.
Meanwhile, the stock market is showing signs of unease regarding AI trading. Neocloud and data center companies have been hurt, with Australia’s Farmus withdrawing IPO plans and SK Hynix Its U.S.-based Solidigm division will undertake similar initiatives.
All eyes are on me now humanThe company expects investors to post more than $80 billion in losses in the first half of this year, with the 14x increase in revenue reflecting seemingly insatiable demand for its core models and services.
“If it falls short of expectations, it’s a bit of a house in the sand,” said Jay Das, co-founder of Sapphire Ventures, whose career in tech investing dates back to the 1990s.
Anthropic’s business is deeply tied to tech giants. Nearly half of its revenue comes from clouds sold through its cloud division. microsoft, Amazon and alphabetall of whom have invested in the company. The IPO could issue about $77 billion in bonds. Amazon, broadcom and googlemeanwhile microsoft and Nvidia The company agreed to invest $15 billion to expand its computing capabilities. Nvidia chips, advanced micro deviceAmazon and Google are supporting the development of Anthropic.
Cloud providers are gradually ramping up capital spending to meet demand, and memory makers are battling shortages to prioritize AI chips. And then there’s the debt factor. Alphabet, which has an investment-grade credit rating, was instrumental in supporting Anthropic for its Texas data center. broadcomThe company, which helps develop chips for Google’s AI lab, is creating a funding pool to help Anthropic and OpenAI deploy high-performance models, CEO Hock Tan told analysts earlier this year.
For public market investors, more than a third of the value of the S&P 500 comes from tech companies, all of which are deeply committed to AI to varying degrees. Additionally, there are software giants such as: adobe and sales force Integrated with Anthropic’s Claude assistant.
Market reset?
And in the private market, check sizes are ballooning, but IPOs are few and far between. Bessemer Venture Partners and Menlo Ventures both told CNBC that Anthropic is their largest investment ever.
“If they don’t perform well, they’ll end up being the vanguard of AI,” said Brad Bernstein, managing partner at growth equity firm FTV Capital. “Their valuations are going to reflect that performance fluctuation, but it’s going to be a trickle-down effect on everything that’s going on with the excess capital that’s being poured into the venture AI world. Everything is going to need to be reset in a way.”
Anthropic is the third publicly traded company to be valued at more than $1 trillion, after Saudi Aramco and Elon Musk. space xdebuted in June. OpenAI could be the fourth.
Anthropic’s revenue is growing at an incredible pace as companies adopt the company’s coding and productivity tools. Sales for the second quarter rose to $11.56 billion from $787 million a year earlier.
The company had approximately $132 billion in cash, equivalents and short-term investments at the end of June. And Anthropic reported an operating profit of $974 million in the second quarter, after five consecutive quarters of operating losses.
Rohit Kulkarni, partner and chief AI officer at Burnham Park Capital Markets, said the current financial situation is “better than feared.” “There may have been more negative information.”
JINAN, CHINA – JULY 17: In this photo illustration, the Kimi K3 logo is displayed on a smartphone screen on July 17, 2026 in Jinan, Shandong Province, China. (Photo courtesy of VCG/VCG, Getty Images)
Video Visual China Group | Getty Images
One cause for concern in some parts of the investment community is the emergence of so-called open-weight models. This model is less expensive for businesses to access and allows for customization and flexibility in terms of where users access the model.
OpenAI and Google are the only two competitors Anthropic named in its prospectus, but the company said it faces competition from a “broader range of model providers,” including open-weight and open-source models.
Anthropic says this is all in the very early stages, with Fortune 500 companies spending less than 0.1% of their total spend on its models and services in the most recent quarter. Michael Monaghan, portfolio manager at Founders ETF, says that’s part of the investment thesis.
“I think there’s room for frontier models like Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceX, and I think there’s room for promiscuous models,” Monaghan said. “It is too early to say that one side will discontinue mediation with the other.”
Spending on AI infrastructure by hyperscalers is expected to reach trillions of dollars, and concerns about market oversupply are warranted, said Sapphire’s Das. But he compares it to the telecommunications and dot-com bubble of the late 1990s, when companies flooded the market with fiber optic equipment. Eventually the infrastructure came into use, but in the meantime many companies went out of business.
“Longer term, I don’t think there’s a lack of demand,” Das said.
downside risk
A lackluster debut could push OpenAI’s service further and make investors reconsider its lofty valuation. At the same time, rising interest rates mean borrowing costs for businesses are increasing.
David Trainer, CEO of financial research firm New Constructs, wrote in a report last month that the AI boom is built on the view that cheap credit and access to capital markets are “readily available.”
“If AI liquidity dries up and the signs are clear, there is significant downside risk to the S&P 500 of 20%, with most of it concentrated in the valuation of AI stocks,” Trainor wrote.
Industry experts are taking a different approach, focusing on the power and rapid adoption of technology. Claude Opus 5.5 Max outperforms all other models on the industry benchmark Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index.
snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy said the technology will only become more essential.
“Anthropic and OpenAI have demonstrated the ability to stay at the frontier of AI and continue to drive innovation,” Ramaswamy said. “They are an amazing company that is making a huge contribution to humanity by expanding the realm of possibility, and we are very excited to see them go public and become a hugely successful company.”
Still, Snowflake is experimenting with low-cost promiscuous models from China’s Moonshot AI, DeepSeek, and Zhipu.
“We want to be as efficient as possible, so we are spending a lot of money on in-house AI,” Ramaswamy said.
WATCH: Anthropic looks set to beat OpenAI to IPO, says FirstMark’s Rick Heitzmann
