It’s official! Anthropic stock’s expected to start trading on the Nasdaq on 19 November under the ticker ‘ANT’. However, this AI lab’s anything but ant-sized, as it’s aiming to raise more than $60bn at a value potentially above $1trn.
This would immediately catapult Anthropic into the big league. Indeed, as things stand, it would make it larger by market-cap than established giants such as Walmart, Visa and JP Morgan Chase.
For a business that was only founded in 2021, this is totally unheard of. Even SpaceX had to earn its chops for 24 years before its record IPO. I’ve got shoes older than Anthropic!
However, as impressive as this is, I’m not going to dive headfirst into this IPO. Rather, I’m giving it a wide berth because I think there’s a good chance it will flop. Here’s why…
Who’s Claude again?
As a quick reminder, Anthropic’s the company behind the Claude family of frontier AI models. Customers use Claude to develop software, carry out research, automate tasks with AI agents, create presentations, and more.
Whereas ChatGPT focuses on the consumer market, so is more well-known, Anthropic’s forte is enterprise customers. I like this because businesses obviously have much larger budgets and their need for AI tools is far deeper than your average Joe.
Enterprises also don’t like to change things often. So there should be stickiness to Anthropic’s revenue. By contrast, most consumers don’t pay for AI chatbots and skip between ChatGPT, Grok and Gemini at the drop of a hat (ie switching costs are lower).
I believe Anthropic holds the record for the fastest scale-up in corporate history. From just $41m at the end of 2023, the firm’s revenue reached $33.2bn in the first nine months of 2026.
By the end of October, Anthropic’s annualised revenue run rate had reached around $81bn.
Mood music? Not good
So far, so good. Why then am I wary about this IPO?
Well, the first reason is the general market mood. At the moment, AI as an investing theme has fallen out of favour. The huge amount of cash being poured into the technology has raised fears of an AI bubble.
As such, many AI-related stocks have plunged in recent weeks.
| Fall from 52-week high | |
| Nvidia | -34% |
| Intel | -56% |
| Micron | -35% |
| KLA Corp | -47% |
| Cerebras Systems | -74% |
| CoreWeave | -50% |
Given that Anthropic’s synonymous with the AI revolution, I fear it could become the whipping boy.
Turning to company-specific reasons, there’s the issue of how much money Anthropic’s going to spend. In the IPO prospectus, the firm highlighted almost $900bn worth of computing commitments with partners such as Amazon and SpaceX.
Also, the company’s warned of a need to build out its own AI infrastructure to reduce reliance on partners, some of whom are rivals/frenemies. I worry this costly endeavour will put off many potential investors.
Admittedly, Anthropic’s share price could surge temporarily before falling back down to Earth. Many high-profile tech IPOs have followed this pattern, including SpaceX.
I could be wrong
My prediction could be wrong here, of course. But given these concerns, I’m going to watch Anthropic from the sidelines when it goes public next week.
It’s still a fascinating growth company, despite my misgivings. If anyone wants a deeper dive, The Twelfth Magpie has created a jargon-free report on Anthropic.
It’s totally free and available to read here…
A clear guide to Anthropic’s IPO (without the hype)
A new free report just landed on Anthropic – and we’ve written it for investors who want the facts, not the noise.
We break down what matters most for the IPO question: could it be a genuine potential opportunity… or is it all baseless hype?
There’s no jargon. No hard sell. Just a straightforward read that you can see immediately.
Ben McPoland owns shares of Nvidia and SpaceX.
This story originally appeared on Motley Fool
