Anthropic eyes IPO as Big Tech’s cash crunch hits Wall Street

Artificial intelligence developer Anthropic took a tentative first step Monday toward becoming a publicly traded company, a move that would give it access to a huge pool of investor money while it opens its books.

Anthropy said Monday on advertisement It secretly filed a draft Form S-1 with the SEC, which allows the company to go public after SEC review. Anthropic said it had not yet determined the number of shares to be offered or their prices, and that the move “will depend on market conditions and other factors.”

An Anthropic representative did not immediately respond to questions regarding expected timing or an evaluation of the offer.

Claude Maker is one of three major tech companies expected to have initial public offerings this year amid what some are calling the “AI gold rush.” SpaceX, the rocket company owned by Elon Musk that also includes Starlink ISP, the xAI artificial intelligence lab, and the social network now known as X, It filed for an IPO in May. The main competitor to Anthropic, maker of ChatGPT OpenAI, is It is expected to follow suit soon.

The frenetic IPO race reflects the market’s desire to cash in on its trillion-dollar bets, as AI companies rush to secure the massive funding needed to survive. The AI ​​industry is capital-intensive, driven by the enormous costs of maintaining the computing power needed to train large language models, as well as the data centers, silicon networks, and energy to keep them running.

Although Anthropic has submitted voluntary documents for regulatory review, that does not guarantee a final decision on the IPO, and it is still possible that the company may decide not to go public, according to Patrick Corriganprofessor of law at the University of Notre Dame. Based on typical SEC timelines, a public filing can be expected within a few weeks, with shares potentially starting to trade in two to four months, Corrigan told CNET in an interview.

Revenue highlight?

The AI ​​industry has been a highly speculative landscape, with valuation determined by a company’s future potential rather than current profits. Online tracker From revenues and losses, it found that more than twice as much money was spent on AI development, indicating billions of dollars in debt. The only major company to come forward is Nvidia, which makes the chips at the heart of the AI ​​gold rush.

Critics point out that AI companies have raised capital by manipulating accounts, using “annual” increases in revenue and ignoring underlying costs to hide weak margins, thus misleading investors.

“Their valuations, at this point, are so high that it is becoming increasingly impractical to raise more capital, and their investors are likely to demand some type of liquidity event,” said Ed Zitron, the study’s author. Where is your ed at Newsletter and host Best offline Podcast.

Anthropy said so last week It raised $65 billion In a financing round, the company was valued at $965 billion. The company has focused heavily on commercial and developer customers, with explosive growth in 2026 driven by its Claude Code programming tool, which could put it ahead of OpenAI in terms of overall value.

But there are limits to what a company can raise in the private market, and these investors will want to get their money back with great returns. Going public and buying shares, not only by individual traders on Robinhood, but also by institutional investors such as insurance companies and pension funds, can raise significantly more capital. These companies will also be able to use this inventory to secure loans that they may not be able to obtain now.

“The scale of it is amazing,” he said. Rob Dollprofessor of business at Tulane University. “The fact that this company raised the same amount of money as I did, and they burned through a ton of money very quickly when they got here.”

Will there be a collapse?

The confidential filing means that we do not yet have access to the documents required for the sale of public shares, including the prospectus detailing the company’s operations and the risks and challenges it faces.

This final public filing should include details about the company’s financials and the many potential risks it faces. Transparency will also be key. “If they lied to investors, the company could be held liable,” Corrigan said.

Just as companies like Google, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft hold quarterly earnings calls, where CEOs take questions from investment analysts about the direction of their businesses, Anthropic and its peers will also have to report regularly on financial information. The CEOs of Anthropic and OpenAI — Dario Amodei and Sam Altman, respectively — will be subjected to the same questioning.

More importantly, public trading of shares in the largest AI companies would put those companies’ valuations in the hands of investors, including the general public, who could buy and sell based on perceptions of the companies’ moves or the AI ​​industry as a whole.

If, as some observers suggest, the industry is overvalued, such fluctuations could deflate the bubble — or inflate it even further.

Zitron believes this could lead to a WeWork-like collapse, as “people realize how bad the underlying economy is.” WeWork, which operates co-working spaces, filed for an IPO in 2019, with documents that raised serious concerns among investors about its corporate governance and ability to turn a profit. The company withdrew its filing a little more than a month later.

It’s hard to know what will happen in a year or two, but the future of these companies tends to be quite binary, leading to either collapse or a major merger. Zitron believes that if OpenAI or Anthropic survive, they could be absorbed or swallowed up by a larger-scale company like Google, Microsoft, or AWS — or eventually delisted from the Nasdaq to operate as a small, niche service provider.

Wall Street could also decide to overlook any weak P&L numbers. Lalka pointed to Meta, which has spent billions of dollars on “metaverse“And it changed its name from Facebook to indicate the transition to this technology Since then he has basically given up. AI companies can be similarly ignored by investors.

“It probably won’t lead to the kind of strict accountability that some say will happen here,” Lalka said.

Other companies, like Uber, have been unprofitable for years. If this remains the case with AI companies, Lalka said, investors may demand that they focus more on projects that generate revenue rather than on “side missions,“OpenAI has also named activities like its video generation app Sora.

Another possibility is that investors are not after the actual value of the company, but rather what they think others will pay for the stock. This possibility, which Corrigan referred to as a “beauty contest,” may give companies a sneak peek at soaring valuations.

“There is a real risk for investors that prices could rise on momentum and then come back down to earth,” he said.