Anthropic IPO tests Wall Street's appetite for standalone frontier AI

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NEWS ANALYSIS

Anthropic’s IPO will show whether a frontier AI company can turn rapid demand growth into a sustainable business.

The generative AI vendor’s market debut will also provide a point of comparison for AI companies lacking the diversified revenue streams of established tech giants such as Google and Microsoft.

In an amended S-1 filing on Tuesday, Anthropic said it plans to offer 825 million shares at $70 to $78 per share. At the midpoint, the offering would value the company at about $1.3 trillion and could raise more than $61 billion.

What it means for the AI market

While the proposed valuation sits below the $2 trillion figure some investors floated over the summer, it still represents one of the largest tech offerings in history.

Going public ahead of rival OpenAI also gives investors a way to compare standalone AI model developers. Unlike Google and Microsoft, which can draw on advertising, enterprise software, cloud revenue and consumer products to fund AI investments, Anthropic relies more heavily on its AI models to cover development and operating costs.

“Anthropic’s IPO will establish the first public benchmark for how investors value AI revenue,” said Monte Malukas, founder and CEO of Stockatomics, a financial data and research platform.

Investors will also scrutinize the financial relationships among AI developers and their infrastructure suppliers, Malukas said. “Some of the demand for Anthropic’s chips and cloud capacity is financed by capital from the very suppliers providing that infrastructure.”

Nvidia illustrates that overlap. Anthropic uses Nvidia GPUs to train and run its models, and the chipmaker has agreed to purchase approximately $10 billion of Anthropic’s Class N shares in a private placement after the IPO, subject to closing conditions.