What’s Riding on Anthropic’s Market Debut? Nearly Everything.

When Anthropic goes public as soon as next month, its first sale of shares will be more than just a big moment for the artificial intelligence company. It will also test the health of the economy, with trillions of dollars at stake.

Anthropic, which makes the Claude chatbot, is one of the biggest companies in the AI industry. Private investors value it at nearly $1 trillion, and it has received more than $130 billion in funding. Its stock offering could raise $100 billion and quickly make it one of the world's largest public companies. But the consequences could reach much further.

Anthropic and its main rival, OpenAI, sit at the top of a large network of business partners and suppliers. These include companies that provide computing power, make chips, supply energy and build AI tools. Over the past four years, all of them have spent heavily because they expect demand for AI products to keep growing.

Anthropic's stock offering will give investors their first detailed look at the health of a key part of the AI boom. It will also test whether that boom can last. Will people keep buying AI services in large enough numbers to justify the money spent on chips, data centers and other equipment? Or will Anthropic's results show that there is a limit to this demand?

"For the market, it's a bellwether," said Umesh Padval, an investor at Seligman Ventures who has worked in technology for nearly 40 years. A bellwether is something people watch to understand where a larger market may be headed.

If Anthropic's stock offering goes badly, investors could lose confidence, leading to a wider fall in stock prices and raising doubts about how much longer the AI boom can last. If it succeeds, it could lift the market and make it easier for other AI companies to sell shares to the public.

Stock markets are already nervous. Technology stocks have broadly fallen this month, led by companies that design and make the computer chips used to power AI. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index has fallen 26% from its June peak. That puts it in a bear market, which means it has dropped at least 20% from a recent high and shows that investors are worried.

Over the past couple of weeks, Microsoft canceled a deal with Nscale, a company that provides data centers. Research firm Gartner predicted that 80% of "neoclouds" — companies that supply AI firms with data and computing power — could be forced out of business. Ken Griffin, the billionaire who owns the hedge fund Citadel, said investors were "almost certainly" in an AI bubble, meaning prices may have risen beyond what the businesses are really worth.

These warning signs have increased concerns about the huge amounts of money being spent on AI equipment and services. Amazon, Meta, Google and Microsoft have said they plan to spend at least $740 billion on AI infrastructure, including data centers, this year. Since 2022, private investors have put $1.1 trillion into Anthropic, OpenAI and other AI companies, according to PitchBook, a company that tracks investments.

As spending and investment have grown in private markets, public investors have also put more money into AI companies. This means the stock market depends more heavily on how well the AI industry performs. The 10 most valuable stocks in the S&P 500 are each worth more than $1 trillion together, and eight of them are technology companies. These 10 stocks make up more than 40% of the index, compared with less than 20% a decade ago.

If Anthropic joins the index, it will likely push either Berkshire Hathaway or Eli Lilly out of the top 10. They are the only companies outside the technology sector with market values above $1 trillion.

"There is a lot riding on this one," said Brad Gastwirth, global head of research and market intelligence at Circular Technology, a company that provides supply chain services. "If it goes bad, it's going to bring down the market."

This month, Anthropic invited investors to its San Francisco headquarters to explain its financial results and plans for growth. By many measures, its numbers were remarkable. The company's revenue reached $16.8 billion in the third quarter, up 45% from the previous quarter. But investors compared that with the much faster growth of 141% in the second quarter.

How Anthropic explains this slowdown will matter. If it happened because the company lost customers to OpenAI or to companies using cheaper open-source AI models, that would suggest that demand for AI services overall is still strong. Open-source AI models are technologies that people can use to build chatbots and other tools that create videos, text and computer code. But if Anthropic's growth slowed because the whole market had less demand for AI products, investors could react much more strongly.

Anthropic declined to comment. The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming that they infringed its copyright by using news content in AI systems. Both companies have denied the claims.

Over the past year, Anthropic has been one of Silicon Valley's most sought-after companies, partly because of Claude Code, a service that changed how software engineers write computer code. Its revenue soared, leading private investors to raise its valuation to $965 billion, higher than OpenAI's.

To keep up with demand for its AI products, Anthropic signed deals worth hundreds of billions of dollars to rent computing power from Google, Amazon and Microsoft. It has also spent money on chips from Nvidia and data centers from Nscale and other providers. The companies that supply Anthropic are also spending large amounts of money on their own suppliers.

But over the summer, some Anthropic customers decided they were spending too much on "tokens," the units of data that AI systems process and produce. They began looking for cheaper options. Meta, one of Anthropic's biggest customers, predicted this year that it would spend as much as $10 billion a year on Anthropic's technology. But Meta later reduced its use of the company's products as it switched to other AI models.

Shares of some AI companies that went public this year have fallen. Shares of Cerebras, a Silicon Valley company that makes AI chips, have dropped about 40% below the price at which they were first offered in May. Shares of Accelevation, an AI infrastructure company, are trading about one-third below their $18 offering price in September. Elon Musk's SpaceX, which went public in June, has also fallen far below its highest price, though its shares remain about 9% above the offering price.

Bankers have warned companies that they may not be able to get the high valuations they were considering just two months ago. During an earnings call this month, David Solomon, the chief executive of Goldman Sachs, said the market for new stock offerings was "wide open." But he added that companies hoping to reach valuations close to those discussed over the summer might decide to wait before going public.

"Things got a little bit softer in September," he said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Erin Griffith and Lauren Hirsch/Dustin Chambers
c.2026 The New York Times Company