Anthropic's $2 Trillion IPO Faces a Market That May Pay Half That

Polymarket traders now put the odds of an Anthropic IPO before December at 57%, down from nearly 90% a week earlier. That collapse in confidence captures the core problem: the Claude chatbot maker wants to go public before Thanksgiving, but the market it would list into is actively deteriorating.

Current conditions place Anthropic in a "very tough spot," Jay Goldberg, an analyst at Seaport Research Partners, told MarketWatch. The offering would function as a referendum on the entire AI-lab business model and the heavy capital spending that has propelled stocks in recent years. A stumble would ripple far beyond one company.

What's driving the selloff?

For the past month, tech stocks have sold off on the prospect of higher interest rates, geopolitical conflict in Iran, and mounting AI-related debt. Midterm election results added another layer: investors worry a Democrat-majority Congress and newly elected Democratic governors will delay data-center buildouts. On Thursday, the Nasdaq Composite recorded its worst day in a year and a half.

The numbers behind Anthropic's own balance sheet explain part of the anxiety. As of Sept. 30, the company held $95.6 billion in cash, according to its prospectus. It has also committed to $895.4 billion of computing and infrastructure agreements, with $69.8 billion of payments due by the end of next September. That's roughly $70 billion due in twelve months against a cash pile of about $96 billion.

Delay or discount?

Anthropic has "some runway before the big compute bills come through," Goldberg noted. If it delays, he believes the company has enough cash for at least the next nine months. But there's a catch: "the bigger issue is that they've already delayed it two or three times," he added. The unofficial timeline has already drifted past early reports of a late-September or early-October listing.

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

The valuation math has moved sharply. Investors initially anticipated a $2 trillion listing that would smash the record SpaceX set earlier this year. On Thursday, the Wall Street Journal reported that potential investors believe the valuation may need to come down closer to $1 trillion, given limited appetite to add AI exposure in a risk-off environment.

What does the growth slowdown mean for investors?

Goldberg suspects Anthropic's own prospectus update contributed to this week's selloff. Third-quarter results, filed Monday, showed roughly $17 billion in revenue — up 1,127% year over year and 47% sequentially. That sounds spectacular, but it marks a real deceleration from 144% sequential growth in the second quarter.

The IPO roadshow becomes the decisive moment. Anthropic must tell institutional investors whether the softer growth reflects infrastructure bottlenecks or weakening 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."

Recent hyperscaler earnings from Amazon, Alphabet and Microsoft showed the same tension: strong AI-fueled cloud growth alongside surging infrastructure costs. And Iran remains the wild card — President Trump said Thursday the world "will know very soon" whether he will order new strikes, an escalation that could further spook markets and make the IPO harder to execute.

Anthropic declined to comment. The practical takeaway for portfolio managers: watch the roadshow framing and the Polymarket odds together — either a discount or a delay now looks like the base case.