Anthropic's Push for a Record IPO Runs Into Investor Doubts Over Price

Anthropic, the artificial intelligence company behind the Claude chatbot, is pressing ahead this week with plans for what bankers have described as one of the largest initial public offerings in Wall Street history, even as some of the investors it is courting have told reporters they are not yet convinced the company's price tag is justified.

The San Francisco-based firm, which first submitted a confidential draft registration to the SEC back in June, filed an amended registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission on November 2 that still leaves the most basic terms of the offering open. The cover page states only that the initial public offering price will fall "between $ and $" per share, with the number of shares to be sold also left blank. The filing confirms Anthropic has applied to list its Class A common stock on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker "ANT," and that it is organized as a public benefit corporation under Delaware law.

What the numbers show

The underlying financial picture, drawn from Anthropic's October 26 public filing and reported widely since, is one of extraordinary revenue growth paired with extraordinary losses. Anthropic's revenue reached roughly $4.6 billion in 2025, up about twelvefold from 2024, according to the prospectus. Its net loss for the same year was nearly $42 billion, though the company says about $34 billion of that figure is a non-cash accounting charge tied to the rising value of convertible securities issued in earlier private fundraising rounds. Operating losses, a cleaner measure of the cash burned running the business, were about $8.1 billion in 2025, up from roughly $3 billion the year before, according to a breakdown of the prospectus figures.

Unaudited figures for the first half of 2026 show revenue climbing further, to about $16.3 billion, while the net loss for that period swelled to roughly $80.7 billion, again driven mostly by non-cash fair-value adjustments rather than operating cash flow. The filing also discloses that nearly a quarter of Anthropic's 2025 revenue came from just two customers, a concentration that registration documents flag as a risk to future results.

A roadshow under scrutiny

Anthropic's underwriters, led by Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, had been expected to begin formally marketing the shares to institutional investors during the week of November 9, which would put a Nasdaq debut on track before the Thanksgiving holiday on November 26, according to reporting that traced the timeline back to Bloomberg. That schedule was already a delay from an earlier target of mid-October.

But Reuters reported on November 6, citing four people familiar with investor discussions, that prospective buyers doubted Anthropic could hold the roadshow on schedule and still complete a November listing. Investors are said to be pushing for a valuation discount below the roughly $1.5 trillion figure that has circulated in early discussions, and want to see an October revenue number that two of the people said was still blank in the amended filing. Their stated concerns, per that report, center on Anthropic's history of quarterly losses and the scale of its long-term spending commitments to cloud and chip partners as it builds out computing capacity for AI training and deployment. Anthropic declined to comment to Reuters on the record.

The hesitation comes against a choppier backdrop for technology listings generally. Several companies have postponed planned share sales in recent weeks after investors balked at proposed valuations, and more than 100 companies that went public in 2026, excluding SpaceX and SK Hynix, carried a weighted-average loss as a group, according to figures cited in the same reporting, even as broader stock indexes have continued to climb this year.

"Anthropic needs to do a financing event. The only question is what kind," Axios business columnist Dan Primack wrote in an assessment of the company's position as it moves toward a public listing.

Who is watching closely

A completed offering at anything close to the figures under discussion would make Anthropic's debut one of the largest in history, in the range of or beyond SpaceX's record-setting listing earlier in 2026, when the rocket company raised $75 billion at a valuation of roughly $1.77 trillion. It would also hand Anthropic a public currency and balance-sheet strength to compete with rivals in the costly race to build and run large AI models, a contest in which compute costs, chip supply and data-center capacity have become the dominant competitive variables.

The listing is being watched closely by Anthropic's thousands of employees and existing investors holding pre-IPO equity, by the Wall Street banks whose fees and reputations are tied to a smooth pricing, and by public-market investors trying to work out how to value a company that loses money by conventional accounting even as its revenue multiplies. It is also being watched by Anthropic's chief competitor, OpenAI, which has said it does not intend to pursue a public listing in 2026 and is instead raising a private round of at least $30 billion at a valuation near $1.4 trillion, according to Axios reporting cited in multiple outlets' coverage of the IPO market this fall. A successful Anthropic listing would set a public, continuously updated market valuation for a frontier AI lab for the first time, a benchmark investors in rival companies would be hard pressed to ignore.

What happens next

Anthropic has not publicly confirmed or denied the reported roadshow timeline, and the company's own filings do not disclose a listing date. If marketing proceeds as bankers have targeted, a pricing of the offering would typically follow within one to two weeks, with trading beginning shortly after. If investor demand does not materialize at the valuation range underwriters have floated, Anthropic could lower its price expectations, delay the listing into early 2027, or both, as other recent IPO candidates have done this fall. As of this week, no new amendment disclosing a price range or share count had appeared in Anthropic's public filings with the SEC, leaving the market to wait for the company's next move.