From Wall Street to Silicon Valley, Anthropic IPO poised to have massive 'trickle-down effect'

Dario Amodei, co-founder and CEO of Anthropic, takes part in a panel at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on January 23, 2025.

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The technology industry needs this to go well. Wall Street does, too.

Anthropic's IPO filing on Monday puts the company behind Claude in a position to try to carry out what could become the biggest stock market launch in history. Investors are already estimating that the five-year-old company could be worth trillions of dollars, putting it among the world's most valuable companies.

This is a major moment for the entire technology industry. The artificial intelligence boom has largely been driven by two companies: Anthropic and OpenAI. OpenAI has also privately filed paperwork to go public, but it has said its stock market debut probably will not happen until 2027.

Meanwhile, the stock market is showing signs of worry about AI investments. Companies that provide cloud computing and data centers have been hit hard. As a result, Australia's Firmus has dropped its IPO plans, and Solidigm, a U.S.-based unit of SK Hynix, has done the same.

Now, everyone is watching Anthropic. The company is betting that investors will look beyond more than $80 billion in losses during the first half of the year. It hopes they will instead focus on revenue that has grown 14 times, showing how strong demand is for its leading AI models and services.

"If it underperforms expectations, it'll be a little bit of a house of cards," said Jai Das, co-founder of Sapphire Ventures, whose career in technology investing began in the 1990s.

Anthropic's business is closely connected to some of the biggest technology companies. Nearly half of its revenue comes from selling Claude through the cloud computing services of Microsoft, Amazon and Alphabet. All three companies have also invested in Anthropic. As part of the IPO, about $77 billion in notes could be issued to Amazon, Broadcom and Google. Meanwhile, Microsoft and Nvidia agreed to invest $15 billion as Anthropic expands its computing capacity. Chips from Nvidia, Advanced Micro Devices, Amazon and Google help power Anthropic's development.

Cloud computing companies are spending more money on equipment and infrastructure to meet demand. Memory chip makers are also dealing with shortages as they try to give AI chips priority. Debt is another concern. Alphabet, which has a strong investment-grade credit rating, agreed to back Anthropic financially for a data center in Texas. Broadcom, which helps Google develop chips for AI research companies, is setting up funding arrangements to help Anthropic and OpenAI run powerful AI models, CEO Hock Tan told analysts earlier this year.

For people investing in public markets, more than one-third of the S&P 500's total value comes from technology companies worth trillions of dollars. All of them are investing heavily in AI to different degrees. Other large software companies, including Adobe and Salesforce, have also added Anthropic's Claude assistant to their products.

Private investment deals have grown much larger, but companies are going public only rarely. Bessemer Venture Partners and Menlo Ventures both told CNBC that Anthropic is the biggest investment they have ever made.

"If they don't perform well, they will become the bellwether for AI," said Brad Bernstein, a managing partner at growth investment firm FTV Capital. "Their valuation will reflect that performance variation, and then it'll just be a trickle-down effect to all the stuff going on with the excess capital that's getting poured into the venture AI world. Everything is going to have to sort of be reset."

Anthropic would be the third company to go public with a valuation above $1 trillion, after Saudi Aramco and Elon Musk's SpaceX, which made its stock market debut in June. OpenAI could become the fourth.

Anthropic's revenue has grown at an extraordinary rate as more businesses use its tools for coding and other work. Revenue in the second quarter reached $11.56 billion, up from $787 million in the same quarter a year earlier.

At the end of June, the company had almost $132 billion in cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments. After reporting operating losses for five quarters, Anthropic recorded $974 million in operating income in the second quarter.

"It is, I think, better than feared," said Rohit Kulkarni, a partner and chief AI officer at Burnham Park Capital Markets, referring to the company's financial results. "There could have been more negative tidbits."

This photo illustration shows the Kimi K3 logo on a smartphone screen in Jinan, Shandong Province, China, on July 17, 2026. (Photo by VCG/VCG via Getty Images)

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Some investors are concerned about the rise of so-called open-weight AI models. Businesses can access these models more cheaply, change them to suit their needs and choose where to run them.

In its IPO filing, Anthropic named only two competitors: OpenAI and Google. However, the company also said it faces competition from a "broader set of model providers," including companies that offer open-weight or open-source models.

Anthropic says the market is still at an early stage. In the latest quarter, Fortune 500 companies spent less than 0.1% of their total expenses on its models and services. Michael Monaghan, a portfolio manager at Founder ETFs, said this is part of the reason he sees investment potential in the company.

"I think there's going to be room for frontier models like Anthropic and OpenAI and SpaceX, and I think there will be room for open-weight models," Monaghan said. "It's way too soon to say that one is going to disintermediate the other."

Major cloud computing companies are expected to spend trillions of dollars on AI infrastructure. Das of Sapphire Ventures said it is understandable that people worry about building more infrastructure than the market needs. But he compared the situation with the telecommunications and dot-com bubble of the late 1990s, when companies built huge amounts of fiber-optic equipment. In the end, the infrastructure was used, although many companies failed before that happened.

"Long term, I don't think there is a lack of demand," Das said.

If Anthropic's stock market debut is disappointing, OpenAI could delay its own offering even further, and investors might question its high valuation. At the same time, rising interest rates are making it more expensive for companies to borrow money.

David Trainer, CEO of financial research firm New Constructs, wrote in a report last month that the AI boom depends on the belief that cheap borrowing and access to financial markets will remain "readily available."

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

Industry experts have a different view. They focus on how powerful the technology is and how quickly it is spreading. Claude Opus 5.5 Max performs better than any other model on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, an industry benchmark used to compare AI models.

Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy said AI technology is becoming more important.

"Anthropic and OpenAI have by now demonstrated their ability to stay at the frontier of AI and keep pushing innovation," Ramaswamy said. "They're incredible companies that are doing a big service to humanity by expanding the frontier of what is possible, and we are very much rooting for them to be public and very successful companies."

Even so, Snowflake is testing cheaper open-weight models from China's Moonshot AI, DeepSeek and Zhipu.

"We spend a lot on internal AI because we want to get as much efficiency as we can," Ramaswamy said.

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