Anthropic IPO Could Start Tech Reset If AI Stock Underperforms

The tech industry needs this to get right. Wall Street too.

Anthropic’s filing Monday puts Claude’s creator in position to pursue what could be the largest initial stock offering in history. Investors already measure the potential market capitalization of the five-year-old company in the trillions, placing it in the category of the most valuable companies in the world.

This is a critical moment for the entire technology sector, as the artificial intelligence boom has been largely driven by two companies: Anthropic and OpenAI. The latter confidentially filed a request for publication, but said its debut would likely not take place before 2027.

Meanwhile, the stock market is showing signs of nervousness regarding AI trading. Neocloud and data center companies have been hit, prompting Australia’s Firmus to withdraw plans for an IPO and SK Hynix The US-based Solidigm unit will do the same.

Now all eyes are on Anthropicwhich is betting that investors will surpass $80 billion in first-half losses and view the 14-fold surge in revenue as a reflection of seemingly insatiable demand for the company’s core models and services.

“If it doesn’t meet expectations, it’s going to be a bit of a house of cards,” said Jai Das, co-founder of Sapphire Ventures whose career in technology investing dates back to the 1990s.

Anthropic’s activities are deeply linked to tech megacaps. Nearly half of its revenue comes from Claude, sold through the cloud divisions of Microsoft, Amazon And Alphabetall of whom hold investments in the company. During the IPO, some $77 billion in notes may be issued to Amazon, Broadcom And Googlewhile Microsoft And Nvidia agreed to invest $15 billion for the company to strengthen its IT capacity. Nvidia chips, Advanced microdevicesAmazon and Google support Anthropic’s development.

Cloud providers are increasing capital spending to meet demand, and memory makers are battling shortages to prioritize AI chips. And there is the debt factor. Alphabet, with its investment grade credit rating, has committed to supporting Anthropic for a data center in Texas. Broadcomwhich helps Google develop chips for AI labs, is creating funding pools to help Anthropic and OpenAI deploy high-performance models, CEO Hock Tan told analysts earlier this year.

For public market investors, more than a third of the value of the S&P 500 comes from trillion-dollar technology companies, all of which are, to varying degrees, dedicated to AI. Beyond that, there are software giants like Adobe And Sales force which were integrated into Anthropic’s Claude assistant.

And in private markets, check sizes have exploded, but IPOs are rare. Bessemer Venture Partners and Menlo Ventures both told CNBC that Anthropic was their largest investment ever.

“If they don’t perform well, they will become the gold standard in AI,” said Brad Bernstein, managing partner at private equity firm FTV Capital. “Their valuation will reflect that variation in performance, and then it will just be a trickle-down effect of whatever is happening with the excess capital that is being pumped into the risky AI world. It’s all going to have to sort of be reset.”

Anthropic will be the third company to go public with a valuation above $1 trillion, after Saudi Aramco and Elon Musk. EspaceXwhich debuted in June. OpenAI could be the fourth.

Anthropic’s revenue has multiplied at a staggering rate as businesses adopt the company’s coding and productivity tools. Second-quarter revenue rose to $11.56 billion from $787 million a year earlier.

The company held nearly $132 billion in cash, equivalents and short-term investments at the end of June. And after five quarters of operating losses, Anthropic reported second-quarter operating income of $974 million.

“It is, I think, better than feared,” said Rohit Kulkarni, partner and head of AI at Burnham Park Capital Markets, referring to the financial data. “There could have been more negative information.”

A source of concern in some areas of the investment universe is the emergence of so-called open-weighted models, which are cheaper for firms to access and allow customization and flexibility in terms of where users access the models.

In the prospectus, the only two competitors Anthropic cited were OpenAI and Google, although the company said it faced competition from a “broader set of model providers,” including open-weight or open-source models.

Anthropic says this is all very early, with Fortune 500 companies spending less than 0.1% of their total spending on its models and services in the most recent quarter. Michael Monaghan, portfolio manager at Founder ETFs, says that’s part of the investment thesis.

“I think there will be room for pioneering models like Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceX, and I think there will be room for open-weight models,” Monaghan said. “It’s way too early to say that one will disintermediate the other.”

With hyperscalers’ spending on AI infrastructure expected to reach billions of dollars, Sapphire’s Das said there was understandable concern about a market glut. But he likens it to the telecommunications and dotcom bubble of the late 1990s, when companies flooded the market with fiber-optic equipment. Eventually the infrastructure was used, although many companies went bankrupt in the meantime.

“Long term, I don’t think there’s a lack of demand,” Das said.

A poor debut could push OpenAI’s bid further and cause investors to rethink its lofty valuation. At the same time, rising interest rates mean it is becoming increasingly costly for businesses to take on debt.

David Trainer, CEO of financial research firm New Constructs, wrote in a report last month that the AI ​​boom was predicated on the idea that cheap credit and access to capital markets would be “readily available.”

“If AI liquidity dries up, and there are clear signs, we see significant downside risk, 20%, in the S&P 500, with most of it concentrated in the valuation of AI-related stocks,” Trainer wrote.

Industry experts are taking a different approach, focusing on the power and rapid proliferation of technology. Claude Opus 5.5 Max performs better than any other model on the industry-leading Artificial Analytics Intelligence Index.

Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy said technology was becoming more and more essential.

“Anthropic and OpenAI have now demonstrated their ability to stay on the frontier of AI and continue to drive innovation,” Ramaswamy said. “These are incredible companies that are doing a great service to humanity by pushing the frontier of what is possible, and we sincerely want them to be public and very successful companies.”

Still, Snowflake is experimenting with low-cost open models from Chinese companies Moonshot AI, DeepSeek and Zhipu.

“We spend a lot on internal AI because we want to get as much efficiency as possible,” Ramaswamy said.

WATCH: Looks Like Anthropic Will Beat OpenAI In IPO, Says FirstMark’s Rick Heitzmann