Anthropic still plans to go public later this month despite Wall Street’s anxiety around the company’s plans for an initial public offering and questions about the true valuation of AI companies more broadly, according to a new report from the Wall Street Journal.
Shares in Anthropic, which will be listed on the Nasdaq as ANT, could become available as soon as Oct. 19 or 20, according to the Journal. As recently as a few months ago there was speculation that Anthropic could be valued at roughly $2 trillion, which would have made it the most valuable company to ever go public. SpaceX was valued at $1.77 trillion when it went public in June.
But those dreams of a record-setting valuation appear much less likely to be fulfilled these days. Last week, investors landed on $1.5 trillion being a much more realistic valuation after AI-adjacent stocks took a beating. CNBC reported on Friday that $1 trillion to $1.25 trillion appeared to be a “more likely” valuation for Anthropic.
The tech-heavy Nasdaq saw its worst month in quite a while this October as the chipmakers and so-called neoclouds saw their stocks sink. Nvidia hit an all-time high of $243.37 per share on October 6, only to sink to $204 per share at the end of the month. Nvidia has crashed even further in November, closing Monday at $178.67.
Nvidia was hit particularly hard on Monday over news that CEO Jensen Huang had engaged in an extramarital affair with a woman suspected of being a Chinese spy. Huang posted a public apology to his wife and children over the affair, but his personal life may be the least of his worries. There’s concern among investors that he may have harmed U.S. national security by selling AI tech to a cutout for the Chinese government. President Donald Trump said during a press conference Monday that the FBI was investigating the incident.
“He’s an amazing guy. I just hope there’s no problem. If there is a problem, we’ll let you know about it. But I hope there’s no problem. I believe he’s suffering greatly,” said Trump.
Trump on Jensen Huang: "He's an amazing guy. I just hope there's no problem. I believe he's suffering greatly."
Investors are nervous about the AI trade overall, and the fates of major stock market indexes rely on these companies succeeding. Anthropic competitor OpenAI filed confidentially to go public in June, but it won’t go public before the end of the year.
Anthropic raked in $33 billion in revenue from Jan. to Sept. 2026, according to its regulatory filings. Those same filings claim that AI could post “catastrophic or existential risks to humanity,” the kind of thing that’s probably jarring to grapple with as an investor.
On the plus side, any truly apocalyptic result would mean that there’s really no downside to investing with Anthropic. Which is to say that if we all die, you don’t need to worry about anything anyway. But the much more likely threat seems to be an AI arms race that puts extremely powerful hacking tools into the hands of nefarious actors. If AI agents somehow crash the U.S. financial system and we’re all left alive, that seems like the worst of all worlds.
