Anthropic investors weigh cutting IPO valuation to $1.5 trillion as revenue growth slows

Some investors weighing a stake in Anthropic's initial public offering are now discussing a valuation of roughly $1.5 trillion for the artificial intelligence company, well below the approximately $2 trillion figure that had circulated in earlier reporting, according to people familiar with the discussions cited by Reuters. The reassessment followed an investor briefing this past Wednesday at Anthropic's San Francisco headquarters, where chief executive Dario Amodei and chief financial officer Krishna Rao presented third-quarter results that showed revenue growing more slowly than in prior periods.

Anthropic has not published the figures itself, has not set a share price or valuation target, and did not respond to requests for comment relayed through reporters, so the numbers should be treated as investor accounts of a private briefing rather than audited results. The company confidentially submitted a draft registration statement to the Securities and Exchange Commission in June, and a public prospectus had not appeared on EDGAR as of this week.

The numbers

According to investors who attended the briefing, Anthropic's revenue for the three months ending in September came to about $16.8 billion, up roughly 45 percent from the second quarter's $11.6 billion. That quarter-over-quarter growth rate is well below the pace of the previous period, when revenue more than doubled from the first quarter's $4.7 billion. The deceleration, rather than the absolute revenue figure, is what unsettled some prospective buyers.

• Q1 2026 revenue: about $4.7 billion
• Q2 2026 revenue: about $11.6 billion, more than double the prior quarter
• Q3 2026 revenue: about $16.8 billion, up about 45 percent sequentially
• Adjusted operating margin in Q3: about 11 percent, with positive adjusted free cash flow

Anthropic told investors it was profitable on an adjusted basis for a second consecutive quarter, a milestone the company has emphasized as it tries to distinguish itself from rivals still burning large sums of cash. Those adjusted figures exclude costs such as employee stock compensation, so they do not amount to net profitability under standard accounting. A draft prospectus reviewed by Reuters in September had shown a net loss of about $42 billion for 2025, a large share of which stemmed from accounting charges tied to earlier fundraising rounds, and disclosed long-term commitments of at least $518 billion for cloud computing and data-center infrastructure over the next decade.

How Anthropic got here

Anthropic, founded in 2021 by Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei after they left OpenAI, has raised successive funding rounds at rapidly rising valuations: a $183 billion post-money valuation last September, then $965 billion after a Series H round in May. A public listing at even $1.5 trillion would represent a large step up from that mark, though far short of the roughly $2 trillion figure that bankers reportedly floated to investors earlier this fall. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are said to be leading the offering, which people close to the process say is now more likely to launch in November, after the U.S. midterm elections, with investor roadshows potentially beginning as early as the week of November 9.

Much of Anthropic's spending is tied to compute capacity secured through its two biggest corporate backers. Amazon, which has invested billions of dollars in the company, struck a deal announced through its own newsroom in which Anthropic would commit to more than $100 billion in Amazon Web Services spending over a decade in exchange for access to as much as five gigawatts of AWS's custom Trainium chips. Google is a separate investor, cloud supplier and distribution partner. Both companies' own earnings are increasingly entangled with Anthropic's fortunes, since both book paper gains and losses on their equity stakes.

Anthropic has also been cutting prices to defend its market position. Earlier this month the company launched Claude Haiku 5.5, a smaller model the company says costs roughly 75 percent less to run on average than its predecessor, aimed at high-volume tasks such as classification and summarization. The discount reflects competitive pressure from both OpenAI, which was approaching an estimated $50 billion in annualized revenue by late September using a different accounting methodology, and from lower-cost Chinese AI labs.

Who is affected

A lower valuation would matter most to existing shareholders, including employees holding equity and venture investors such as ICONIQ, Fidelity, Lightspeed Venture Partners, the Qatar Investment Authority, Blackstone and Coatue, several of which participated in the $13 billion Series F round. It would also reverberate through Amazon and Alphabet, both of which carry Anthropic stakes on their books and whose cloud divisions depend heavily on Anthropic as a customer. A sluggish reception for Anthropic's offering could color how investors approach other AI-adjacent listings; shares and bonds of the cloud-infrastructure company CoreWeave fell sharply this past week amid broader unease about debt-financed data-center spending, and two unrelated IPOs, from SB Energy and Holtec Nuclear's nuclear unit, were recently postponed or withdrawn.

Reaction

Not every investor has turned cautious. Some participants in the pre-IPO discussions reportedly pushed for a higher number even as others argued for the reduction, and at least one prominent AI-focused fund manager, Atreides Management's Gavin Baker, has argued publicly in recent months that Anthropic's underlying unit economics and free-cash-flow trajectory justify a far higher valuation than $1.5 trillion once the company's growth is annualized over the next two years.

"Our custom AI silicon offers high performance at significantly lower cost for customers, which is why it's in such hot demand," Amazon chief executive Andy Jassy said when Amazon expanded its Trainium and investment arrangement with Anthropic earlier this year, a deal whose economics are now central to how investors are pricing the IPO.

Analysts covering the AI sector have generally framed the valuation debate as a referendum on whether frontier AI companies can sustain triple-digit revenue growth indefinitely, or whether a deceleration to still-rapid but more ordinary growth rates, as Anthropic appears to be showing, is the more durable pattern for a maturing industry.

What happens next

Anthropic has not confirmed a listing date, price range or valuation, and a public S-1 registration statement had not appeared on the SEC's EDGAR system as of this week. Under securities rules, a prospectus generally must be publicly available at least 15 days before a roadshow begins, meaning a public filing would need to surface in the coming weeks if bankers intend to start marketing shares in early November as some reports suggest. Investors and employees holding equity are watching for that filing, which would for the first time give outside analysts audited figures to check against the investor-briefing numbers now circulating secondhand.