According to a report by The Wall Street Journal on Thursday, after a significant sell-off in artificial intelligence stocks, major investors are becoming increasingly skeptical about whether the initial public offering of Anthropic can proceed as expected with a valuation of $1.5 trillion.

Anthropic submitted an application last month and plans to list on NASDAQ under the stock code “ANT”. According to The Wall Street Journal, the company's original goal was to list a week before Thanksgiving and raise up to $100 billion in funds. However, three major investors who plan to participate in this IPO told the newspaper that the valuation is likely to need to be lowered, with one of them believing that the valuation could be closer to $1 trillion.

An investor told The Wall Street Journal that the company's fundraising scale might also be lower than planned, perhaps only around $80 billion. Another investor stated that Anthropic might consider postponing the issuance until market conditions improve. The report indicates that Anthropic executives and advisors are expected to meet in the coming days to discuss the relevant plans.

These concerns arose on Thursday after AI stocks faced a sell-off. At that time, investors were weighing whether the progress of the Democratic Party in the midterms would lead to stricter regulation of data center construction. NBC News reported that the S&P 500 index fell by 4.4%, while the Nasdaq 100 index, which has a higher weight of tech stocks, dropped by 6.3%, both recording their worst performances since April 2025; the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index fell by 12.3%, and NVIDIA declined by 9.2%. By Friday morning, some of those losses had been recovered. According to Yahoo Finance, as of 11:21 a.m. Eastern Time, the Nasdaq Composite Index had risen by 1.4%, and NVIDIA had increased by 3.4%.

Reuters reports that Democrats are planning to introduce legislation to protect consumers from rising electricity costs associated with data centers, calling for independent testing of advanced AI systems and clarifying under what circumstances AI companies should be held responsible for any damages. However, with Trump still in the White House, any such legislation may face significant resistance. The report also states that the party plans to strengthen oversight of leading AI companies, including Anthropic.

Senator Bernie Sanders (independent from Vermont) calls for a "national data center moratorium"; meanwhile, CNBC reports that the incoming governor of Texas, Gina Hinojosa, has pledged to suspend the approval of data centers in that state. Texas is one of the states in the United States where planned data center capacity accounts for more than a quarter.

The Telegraph quoted technology analyst Richard Windsor as saying that, in the current environment, the postponement of IPO by Anthropic has become a "rising risk." Analyst Nalin Patel told the newspaper: "If the callback continues for a longer period, postponing the listing will help to avoid short-term valuation risks and is also more likely to happen."

Some investors hope to see the performance of Anthropic for October before deciding whether to lower their valuation. According to The Wall Street Journal, the company's annualized revenue run rate as of the end of October has exceeded $80 billion, and it held $146.6 billion in cash as of September 30.

What does the forecasting market think?

Traders have lowered their expectations for the listing time of Anthropic. On Polymarket, traders believed on Friday that the probability of Anthropic being listed before November 20 was 43%, and the probability of it being listed by the end of the year was 71%. On Kalshi, traders bet that Anthropic would officially confirm the time of IPO; as of Friday, the probability of this confirmation occurring before December 1 had dropped by 15 percentage points to 59%, and the probability of it occurring before January 1 had decreased to 68%. In the prediction market Decrypt Predict developed by the parent company Dastan, traders also gave a probability of Anthropic happening before 2027 of 71%.

The valuation that is currently under question is already lower than the earlier expectations. In September, Decrypt reported that a leaked draft document indicated that Anthropic was seeking a valuation of approximately $2 trillion.

Disclosure

This article was drafted with the assistance of the Claude model developed under the AI framework, which is in turn based on Anthropic.