Institutional Investors Tell Anthropic Its IPO Is Worth $1.5T-$1.6T, Not the $2T Once Floated, as the Tech Selloff Deflates the Deal

The largest AI listing of the year is getting a reality check from the people who are supposed to buy it. According to Wall Street Journal sources, institutional investors have told Anthropic and its advisers over the past several days that they believe the company's IPO — planned for later this month — should value it at around $1.5 trillion to $1.6 trillion, far below the roughly $2 trillion valuation that circulated in recent months.

The concerns investors listed read like a summary of this autumn's market anxiety: volatile equities after a double-digit selloff in tech stocks last week — triggered partly by disappointing results from Intel and Alphabet — growing worry about the market's concentrated AI exposure, the intensifying political backlash against data centers, and uncertainty about when hyperscalers like Amazon and Meta will show real profits from their AI spending.

Anthropic has not finalized a valuation target and is still deciding how many shares to sell. The pressure is not entirely new: after the company's investor day last month, some investors already told it that its value should be closer to $1.5 trillion. But that was before last week's selloff turned softness into a repricing.

Not everyone sees the lower band as bad news. Some investors told the Journal they expect CFO Krishna Rao to set a deliberately conservative valuation to make sure IPO buyers get a first-day pop — and they argue that even if Anthropic lists at about $1.5 trillion, first-day trading could push its market capitalization toward $2 trillion by the close. The comparison being passed around: Elon Musk's SpaceX jumped 30% on its June listing day, before the current wave of AI anxiety set in.

The timing is tight. Anthropic plans to launch its investor roadshow as early as next week and to list the week before Thanksgiving. When the roadshow starts, it will publish the number of shares it intends to sell and its target price range — the moment the market gets its first formal answer on where the company is really priced.

Context matters for why investors are picky. Anthropic's amended S-1, filed Monday, disclosed $895.4 billion in committed purchases and lease agreements, substantially all related to compute and infrastructure, alongside third-quarter revenue of nearly $17 billion — up roughly 12 times year over year — and a $23.3 billion quarterly net loss. The company is growing extraordinarily fast and spending even faster, and public-market investors will now have to decide, for the first time, what that combination is worth on a Nasdaq ticker.

What it means: the IPO will be the first hard price discovery for a frontier-model lab in the current market, and the gap between $1.5 trillion and $2 trillion is not cosmetic — it is the difference between pricing Anthropic as a company on a credible path to profits and pricing it as the apex of the AI trade. Whoever wins that argument, the listing will reset the reference point for OpenAI, and for every private AI valuation that follows it.