The AI trade is now counting on Anthropic's IPO - but it couldn't be happening at a worse time

By Christine Ji

The ongoing tech selloff is leading investors to wonder if Anthropic will delay its IPO or list at a discount

Anthropic reported nearly $17 billion in third-quarter revenue, though its sequential growth cooled to 47%.

Anthropic's push to go public before Thanksgiving is hitting unexpected turbulence.

The maker of the Claude chatbot lies at the center of the artificial-intelligence boom, and Anthropic's (ANT) initial public offering would be a major vote of confidence in the business model of AI labs and the heavy spending that's propelled the stock market in recent years.

But mounting investor anxiety is now rippling across the AI sector, creating an unfriendly backdrop that may force Anthropic to delay its IPO or settle for a lower valuation.

Current market conditions put Anthropic in a "very tough spot," Jay Goldberg, an analyst at Seaport Research Partners, told MarketWatch.

For the past month, tech stocks have sold off on the prospect of higher interest rates, geopolitical conflict in Iran and the growing amount of AI-related debt. The results of the midterm elections further fueled concerns, as investors worried that a Democrat-majority Congress and newly elected Democratic governors would delay data-center buildouts. In turn, the Nasdaq Composite COMP recorded its worst day in a year and a half on Thursday.

On Polymarket, the odds of Anthropic going public before December were hovering around 57% on Friday, down from nearly 90% the week before. (Polymarket has a data partnership with MarketWatch's publisher, Dow Jones.)

As of Sept. 30, Anthropic had $95.6 billion in cash on its balance sheet, according to its prospectus. The company has also entered into $895.4 billion of computing and infrastructure agreements, with $69.8 billion of payments due by the end of next September.

Anthropic has "some runway before the big compute bills come through," Goldberg noted. Should the company choose to delay the IPO, the analyst believes it has enough cash for at least the next nine months.

However, "the bigger issue is that they've already delayed it two or three times," he added. While Anthropic hasn't set an official date for the IPO, the unofficial timeline has drifted past initial reports of a late-September or early-October listing.

Lior Prosor, managing partner at venture-capital fund Deep33, believes Anthropic is "more likely to proceed than delay, with the company and its bankers agreeing to a somewhat steeper IPO discount for the volatility."

Investors had initially anticipated a $2 trillion valuation that would smash the record set by SpaceX (SPCX) earlier this year. On Thursday, the Wall Street Journal reported that potential investors in the IPO believe Anthropic's valuation might need to come down closer to $1 trillion, as they're unsure if investors will have much appetite to add to their AI holdings in a risk-off environment.

It's unclear what needs to happen to shake the market rout. Recent earnings results from tech "hyperscalers" - including Amazon.com (AMZN), Alphabet (GOOGL) (GOOG) and Microsoft (MSFT) - showed strong AI-fueled cloud growth, but also surging infrastructure costs.

Seaport's Goldberg suspects that Anthropic's own financial details contributed to this week's broader tech selloff, after it updated its prospectus with third-quarter results on Monday.

The company generated roughly $17 billion in revenue in the third quarter, up 1,127% year over year and a 47% jump from the previous quarter. However, it marked a deceleration from the 144% sequential growth in the second quarter.

During its IPO roadshow, Anthropic will get an opportunity to market itself to potential institutional investors and provide more clarity on the growth slowdown. The company will need to communicate whether the softer sales growth is the result of infrastructure bottlenecks or less demand for its products.

"The Anthropic roadshow, if it takes place, could be a positive catalyst," Goldberg said. "But it could be a negative one, too."

The other wild card is what happens with Iran. President Trump said Thursday that the world "will know very soon" whether he will order new strikes on the country - a potential escalation of the Middle East conflict that could further spook markets and make an Anthropic IPO harder to pull off.

Anthropic declined to comment.

-Christine Ji

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(END) Dow Jones Newswires

11-07-26 0830ET