Anthropic is still preparing to go public this month, but its expected valuation has dropped sharply after the midterm elections triggered a selloff in AI stocks. Potential investors are now discussing a valuation of about $1.2 trillion to $1.3 trillion, with some as low as $1.1 trillion, Bloomberg reported Friday, Nov. 6. That’s down from talk of $2 trillion in early October.
The company, which makes the Claude AI models, plans to list on the Nasdaq under the ticker ANT. It had aimed to start marketing the deal to investors the week of Nov. 9 and begin trading before Thanksgiving. It has not set a price range, and it declined to comment to Reuters, Bloomberg and CNBC.
Why is the Anthropic IPO valuation falling?
Two forces hit at the same time. First, tech stocks dropped hard after the election. The Nasdaq on Thursday had its steepest one-day decline in 19 months. Truist’s Keith Lerner told Reuters that tech stocks had trailed the broader market by more than 10 percentage points over the past month, the widest gap since 2002. Data center operators like CoreWeave and Nebius have lost about half their market value in a month.
Second, investors want more information. Reuters reported that Anthropic left its October revenue figure blank in its updated IPO filing. Buyers want that number to see whether growth picked up again after slowing in recent months.
How did the midterms affect Anthropic?
AI became a voting issue. Voters opposed data center ballot measures in 40 of 41 cases, CNBC reported, and more than half of voters in an NBC News exit poll said AI data centers were a crucial or major factor in their congressional vote. A University of Southern California survey released Monday found that 71% of respondents don’t trust big tech companies at all to act in the public’s interest when building data centers.
Anthropic sells mostly to businesses and has kept a lower public profile than OpenAI. Going public would bring more attention, including quarterly earnings reports and new billionaire employees, at a time when public opinion of AI is low.
What does Anthropic’s filing say about the backlash?
Most coverage has missed this point. Anthropic’s own IPO filing warns that opposition to data center projects has become more organized across the country and that its high profile could draw extra scrutiny to projects connected to it. The company’s filing also lists about $895.4 billion in committed spending, nearly all of it on computing and infrastructure. That’s close to the $965 billion valuation from its private funding round in May.
That’s the key tension in the deal. Anthropic needs huge amounts of data center capacity to keep growing, and voters just showed they don’t want that capacity built near them.
Why do data centers matter to Black communities?
The fight over where data centers go isn’t new for many Black neighborhoods. In Memphis, residents of the predominantly Black Boxtown area spent much of the past two years challenging pollution from Elon Musk’s xAI data center, which isn’t connected to Anthropic. Many voters said they worried about higher utility bills and environmental harm, concerns that tend to hit lower-income and Black communities hardest. Any company relying on new data center capacity will have to answer to those voters.
Is the Anthropic IPO still worth watching?
Opinions are divided. Georgetown finance professor Reena Aggarwal told CNBC that going public will put Anthropic in the spotlight even more because AI has become a divisive issue. Renaissance Capital’s Matt Kennedy argued that being public also forces more transparency and shouldn’t expose Anthropic to more criticism than private rivals face. Cherry Lane Investments’ Rick Meckler told Reuters that AI companies will still be part of the future and that some pullback in private market valuations is normal.
Some analysts expect strong demand from individual investors, as SpaceX saw earlier this year. Others told Bloomberg that pricing near $1 trillion could help avoid big price swings after trading starts.
What happens next with the Anthropic IPO?
Investors should watch three things: whether the roadshow starts on schedule this week, what price range Anthropic files and whether it releases its October revenue. Reuters reported that a delay is possible if AI stocks keep falling. Anthropic hasn’t withdrawn its filing or announced a delay.
This story is for information only and is not investment advice.
