Investors are lowering valuation expectations for Anthropic’s upcoming IPO after recent financial disclosures. During a Wednesday meeting in San Francisco, some investors discussed a $1.5 trillion valuation, down from the previously expected $2 trillion. While third-quarter revenue grew 45% to $16.8 billion, many remain concerned about slowing sequential growth rates.
NEW YORK, Oct 15 (Reuters) - Some current Anthropic investors and prospective investors in its upcoming initial public offering are weighing a lower valuation for the AI company after its latest financial disclosures, four people familiar with the matter said, amid broader concerns over the ballooning cost of financing AI.
Some investors who attended Anthropic's investor day on Wednesday in San Francisco discussed a valuation of around $1.5 trillion, three of the people said, a significant step down from the roughly $2 trillion valuation that investors had previously expected for the November share sale.
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At Wednesday's meeting, Anthropic told prospective IPO investors that its third-quarter revenue jumped 45% to $16.8 billion from the previous quarter, and that it was profitable on an adjusted basis during the quarter.
While those numbers assuaged some concerns about the massive costs of developing AI systems, some investors were disappointed by the slowing sequential growth rate in the latest quarter, as Anthropic's revenue more than doubled from the first quarter to $11.6 billion in the second quarter, the people added. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak publicly on the matter.
Anthropic did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
A cooler reception for Anthropic's IPO could weigh on the wider AI market, whose near-term prospects investors see as hinging largely on the share sale's success, followed by OpenAI's potential listing next year.
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A disappointing share sale for Anthropic could further add to investor worries about the AI buildout.
The IPO market has suffered some setbacks recently, after data center operator SB Energy decided to delay its listing last month, while nuclear technology company Holtec Nuclear pulled its plans to go public.
During Wednesday's meeting at Anthropic's headquarters in San Francisco, attendees, mostly the company's most prominent investors, met with CEO Dario Amodei and finance chief Krishna Rao.
Last year, Anthropic's revenue surged twelvefold to nearly $4.6 billion, even as the company lost more than $8 billion on an operating basis, excluding writedowns of various liabilities mostly tied to previous fundraising, Reuters reported last month. In its IPO prospectus seen exclusively by Reuters in September, Anthropic laid out a vision that AI will transform the global economy more profoundly than industrialization, electricity and the internet, even as it reported a loss of $42 billion in 2025 and projected more spending for the upcoming AI buildout.
The company has committed to spending at least $518 billion over a decade for cloud services, computing and infrastructure.
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Reporting by Milana Vinn and Anirban Sen in New York; Additional reporting by Krystal Hu in San Francisco; Editing by Echo Wang, Kenneth Li and Matthew Lewis
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Milana Vinn reports on technology, media, and telecom (TMT) mergers and acquisitions. Her content usually appears in the markets and deals sections of the website. Milana previously worked at GLG and PE Hub, where she spent several years covering TMT deals in private equity. She graduated from CUNY Graduate School of Journalism with Masters in Business Journalism.
Anirban Sen is the Editor in Charge of Market Structure at Reuters in New York where he leads the news agency's coverage of stock exchanges, and market-making firms including Jane Street and Citadel Securities. Previously Anirban was M&A Editor at Reuters, leading a team of reporters who regularly broke market-moving news about the biggest deals in corporate America. Some of his scoops have included Mars' $36 billion deal for snack maker Kellanova, design software firm Synopsys' $35 billion deal for Ansys, and buyout firm GTCR’s $18.5 billion deal for merchant services provider Worldpay. In 2023, Anirban was part of a Reuters team that won a Gerald Loeb Award for the agency's coverage of the collapse of FTX. After starting with Reuters in Bangalore in 2009, he left in 2013 to work as a technology deals reporter in several leading business news outlets in India, including The Economic Times and Mint. Anirban rejoined Reuters in 2019 as Editor in Charge, Finance, to lead a team of reporters in India, covering everything from investment banking to venture capital.