Anthropic presses ahead with IPO before Thanksgiving despite tech selloff
The Claude developer is still aiming to go public before Thanksgiving, though it now expects a lower valuation than it once hoped for, as broad technology stocks slide.
Anthropic, the company behind the Claude family of AI models, is pressing ahead with plans for an initial public offering before Thanksgiving, even as a broad selloff in technology stocks unsettles markets. According to the reporting, the company is now targeting a valuation of between $1.25 trillion and $1.75 trillion, well below the $2 trillion it had earlier hoped for. The shift suggests the company is willing to accept a more modest price tag in exchange for keeping its timetable intact.
The offering is expected to raise between $80 billion and $100 billion. Those figures would make it one of the largest public listings in recent years, and they underline how much investor appetite for AI companies will shape the timing and terms of the deal. The size of the raise and the valuation are both tied to what the company can achieve in a market where confidence in technology shares has weakened. The company has not yet confirmed its final valuation or the size of the offering, so the numbers remain targets rather than settled terms.
The timing sits against a difficult backdrop. Technology shares are falling across the board, and the pullback has already forced rivals to reassess their own ambitions. OpenAI, Anthropic's closest competitor in the generative AI market, recently had to cut its valuation, a signal that even the most prominent AI developers are not immune to shifts in market sentiment. Anthropic's decision to proceed despite the downturn therefore stands out, because it means the company is testing investor demand at a moment when comparable firms have already been forced to lower their expectations.
Whether the Thanksgiving timeline will hold remains uncertain. Market conditions could change before the shares are priced, and any further weakness in technology stocks could push the company to adjust the valuation, the offering size or the schedule. Pricing typically follows investor feedback during the marketing period, which means the final figures may differ from the current targets. For now, the plan is to list before the holiday, but the final terms depend on how investors respond in the coming weeks.
The company develops the Claude models, which place it at the center of a sector that has drawn heavy investment and intense scrutiny over the past two years. An IPO of this scale would give public shareholders a stake in a business whose valuation has been driven largely by expectations about the future of artificial intelligence, rather than by current profits. That dependence on expectations is precisely what makes the present market weakness relevant: when sentiment turns, companies whose worth rests on growth forecasts tend to feel the pressure first.
Source: the-decoder.com
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