The autumn rush of artificial intelligence companies to the stock market has narrowed to a single name. Anthropic is pressing ahead with plans to hold its initial public offering in mid-November, even as a string of other AI-related listings have been shelved or postponed, according to people familiar with the matter.
The company’s prospectus could become public as early as late October, and Anthropic is expected to begin marketing its shares to prospective investors during the week of November 9, Reuters reported on Thursday. The people cautioned that the timetable remains subject to change.
It is an unusually lonely path to the public markets. A technology IPO calendar that looked busy a few months ago has been thinned by market jitters: Switch, Nscale, SB Energy, Elice, AirTrunk REIT and Firmus have all delayed or withdrawn their listings. Investors have grown more cautious as interest rates rise and shares of AI infrastructure operators such as CoreWeave sell off, prompting harder questions about whether the industry’s enormous data-centre spending will ever be paid back.
Nscale’s delay was partly driven by comments from staff at the US Securities and Exchange Commission, underscoring the regulatory glare now falling on the sector.
The numbers inside Anthropic’s draft prospectus, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, help explain both the confidence and the questions. Revenue reached $16.3 billion in the first half of 2026, but the company recorded a net loss of more than $80 billion over the same period — largely an accounting adjustment tied to financing agreements, rather than day-to-day cash losses. Roughly one-fifth of that revenue came from just two customers, a concentration that will draw scrutiny from new investors.
The document also signals that Anthropic could spend as much as $750 billion in the coming years on computing capacity, including agreements that are still being negotiated — a figure that shows just how far the industry’s appetite for chips and data centres still stretches.
On valuation, expectations remain stratospheric. People familiar with the company’s thinking believe a figure near $1.5 trillion is plausible, while the Journal’s review of the draft prospectus referenced a potential $2 trillion valuation.
Anthropic did not immediately respond to Reuters’ request for comment.
Sources: Reuters (https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/anthropic-ipo-stands-alone-ai-market-jitters-sideline-others-2026-10-22/) and The Wall Street Journal (https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anthropic-revenue-growth-ipo-accaf0f1).
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