At the ballot box this week, Americans made clear their disdain for tech billionaires and their distrust of artificial intelligence. Against this background, Anthropic is planning to go public.
The AI company is gearing up for a potentially historic IPO, likely targeting a Nasdaq debut in mid-November. CNBC reported Friday that Anthropic investors are valuing the company at $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion, below the $2 trillion goal set in recent months.
From Wall Street to Main Street, the environment is becoming tougher for humanity. The Nasdaq on Thursday suffered its steepest decline in 19 months, making October its worst month since March 2025, but is set to fall in early November. Chipmakers and NeoCloud, the companies most closely tied to building AI, have been hit the hardest.
Voters condemned AI in Tuesday’s midterm elections, while giving Democrats sweeping victories in Congresses across the country. Candidates advocating stricter AI regulation easily won in states like Michigan, Ohio, Texas and Georgia, all of which have Democratic governors, and where local governments opposed data center-related ballot measures in 40 of 41 cases.
More than half of voters said AI data centers are “important” or “a major factor” in who they support in Congress, according to an NBC News exit poll.
“People don’t want data centers coming near them if it just houses AI that serves the interests of big tech companies,” University of Virginia behavioral scientist Maura Austin told CNBC. “What Anthropic is doing, going public at such a high valuation, is leaning into a kind of caricature of big tech companies and billionaires. I don’t expect that to sit well with the public.”
Anthropic has long sought to position itself as a safety-focused company that takes the potential risks and benefits of AI seriously. CEO Dario Amodei co-founded the company with several academic defectors. OpenAInow its biggest rival. Anthropic is best known for developing a family of AI models called Claude, and primarily sells its products and services to other companies.
Because of its enterprise focus, the company avoids becoming the public face of AI, leaving that distinction to OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman. But with Anthropic poised to become the first pure AI company to enter the public markets, creating many new billionaires and even more billionaires in the process, the level of scrutiny is increasing even further.
“Just being a publicly traded company puts you in the spotlight,” Leena Agarwal, a finance professor at Georgetown University, said in an interview. “And because AI is such a hot topic, Anthropic will be in the spotlight even more.”
Matt Kennedy, senior IPO market strategist at Renaissance Capital, said that’s not necessarily a bad thing for Anthropic.
He said public markets require greater transparency, and the company could attract new users through its debut. And as AI has become a mainstream topic of conversation, some private companies are already household names.
President Kennedy said, “I would say that publicly traded companies are less deserving of criticism than equivalent private companies.” “Therefore, Anthropic should not be subject to more intense public scrutiny than OpenAI simply because it is public.”
Antropic declined to comment.
data center backflow
Dario Amodei, co-founder and CEO of Anthropic, looks on as Speaker of the House Mike Johnson speaks to the press after a meeting with technology executives on artificial intelligence at the White House on September 29, 2026 in Washington, DC. September 29, 2026.
Kent Nishimura | AFP | Getty Images
The backlash against AI accelerated over the summer after a series of high-profile safety and security incidents made headlines. As concerns grow, the debate over data centers intensifies, and tech hyperscalers simultaneously raise their capital spending forecasts, each reaching hundreds of billions of dollars.
Anthropic and OpenAI rely on state-of-the-art data centers to train models and serve customers, and are looking to build capacity as quickly as possible to meet demand. Anthropic said in an amended IPO prospectus this week that it has purchase commitments and lease agreements totaling approximately $895.4 billion, “substantially all of which are related to computing and infrastructure.”
Americans, struggling with inflation and persistently high gas prices, are increasingly concerned that the facility will worsen environmental damage, raise utility bills and lead to job losses. For many, a proposed data center in their backyard has become a physical representation of widespread anti-AI sentiment.
Anthropic said in the risk factors section of its prospectus that opposition to data center development is becoming more organized across jurisdictions, and that the company’s profile could draw particular scrutiny to related projects.
Gartner analyst Nicole Greene said she expects Anthropic’s management to be prepared to counter the AI backlash, especially given the technology’s disruptive nature.
“There’s going to be a lot of emotion,” Green told CNBC. “With big emotions and feelings – fear and excitement – comes increased scrutiny.”
Amodei acknowledged the worsening sentiment around AI in a post about X in August. He said this is the result of a “crisis of trust”, with people believing that businesses, governments and the tech industry are constantly “creating new ways to erode trust”.
It will be an uphill battle to regain public trust as the company begins providing quarterly financial updates.
The University of Southern California released a survey on Monday that found that 71% of respondents have “absolutely” no trust in big tech companies to act in society’s best interests when it comes to data center development.
“Once you lose trust, it’s hard to get it back,” Wendy Bruin de Bruin, a professor at the Schaefer Institute at the University of Southern California, said in an interview. “The numbers aren’t good.”
WATCH: Alex Kantrowitz: Anthropic doesn’t have much flexibility on IPO timing
