Anthropic’s IPO to Cast Long Shadow Over Private AI Stocks

For years, the private market has had little clarity on how to price the artificial intelligence companies that are now riding a wave of unprecedented growth. And for better or worse, Anthropic is about to change all that, with its Wall Street IPO coming in November.

On the upside, it’s going to be a whole new ballgame for investors when it comes to price transparency after making the best of the private market’s opaque valuation. Whether in primary funding rounds or trading secondhand shares, private investors rely on intricate channels and negotiation to reach consensus when valuing any company, let alone those in the fast-moving AI frontier lab realm. Daily, real-time data and regular financial reporting from a market leader will set a new standard, despite the untested economics.

On the other hand, the sudden unleashing of publicly available data and analysis also raises the stakes, pressuring AI companies to keep up. Expectations will be much higher, and they will come from a vastly larger contingent: the broader investing public. With information on business performance—and novel metrics to gauge them—AI founders face a higher bar and much greater scrutiny about their inner workings. Among the next wave of companies are OpenAI, Mistral, Scale AI, Thinking Machines Lab, Cohere, and Safe Superintelligence.

Anthropic kicked off its public disclosures through its IPO filing this week, sparking a wave of commentary, speculation, and debate. One of the most pivotal performance indicators for the still-emerging cohort of frontier AI labs will be their ability to churn out new releases of large language models. Analysts and investors will judge their models by how much customers use them, which in turn goes into training future models.

Anthropic’s value depends heavily on businesses’ adoption of Claude, its frontier AI platform, making the company vulnerable to rivals’ new model releases, as customers can experiment with alternatives and reduce consumption even without fully terminating contracts. Anthropic’s IPO filing said it had nearly 12,000 customers with revenue of $100,000 or more as of Sept. 30.

The company’s share price is apt to fluctuate with each new model, which Anthropic releases about twice a year. “That means every pre-IPO company will get judged relative to the performance of Anthropic’s model, which means there’s going to be a lot more focus on how they train it and who they’re distributing through,” says PitchBook senior analyst Harrison Rolfes. He says this scrutiny puts a kind of follow-the-leader pressure on Anthropic’s rivals, but it also lets them observe and match what the leader is doing quarter to quarter.

Another crucial yardstick will be how efficiently companies can manage their all-important computational resources, or “compute.” Anthropic and its peers have pledged to invest hundreds of billions in coming years to build the specialty chips, networking equipment, and computing services at the foundation of the industry—capital outlays unmatched in history.

Anthropic has already committed at least $855 billion to compute and infrastructure, Rolfes notes, counting data center leases that haven’t started, minimum purchase commitments, and agreements signed after June 30. Most of that total is owed under fixed or minimum terms. “If investors use Anthropic as the yardstick for the next group of labs, one of two things happens,” he says. “Expectations for those companies come down, or the market decides Anthropic’s valuation assumed too much.”

Anthropic’s public listing also matters because, like SpaceX before it, the stock will likely soon be added to key market indexes such as the Nasdaq 100 to reflect widely held equities. Anthropic is already a component of the Morningstar PitchBook US Modern Market 100 Index, which was built to accurately capture the breadth of equities—public and private—that track today’s economy.

Bids on Anthropic’s privately traded stock in the secondary market have gone as high as $2.0 trillion and then down to a more recent range of $1.5 trillion-$1.8 trillion. Trade execution has been limited because of the company’s transfer restrictions, so a public price will bring fresh clarity, according to Adam Crawley, co-founder of Augment Markets, a pre-IPO marketplace. “The institutional market is pretty sophisticated,” he says. “But there is that information gap, which allows opportunity.”