Anthropic delays IPO roadshow as $2T valuation test looms

According to sources familiar with the matter, Anthropic will commence the marketing process for its IPO in the middle of October and conclude the listing just before the US mid-term elections in November, which marks a deviation from the company’s original timeline.

The postponement raises a broader question for public investors: will they be prepared to pay the same exorbitant prices for frontier AI as their private counterparts? Some investors estimate that the company could be valued at close to $2 trillion, which would put Anthropic on course to launch one of the largest IPOs in history. This would also provide the first major test of whether a trillion-dollar private AI valuations can stand in the market.

A late-September prospectus and a $15 billion backstop

The strongest shift appears procedural. According to two sources that spoke to Reuters, Anthropic was set to submit its IPO prospectus as early as this week, but those documents probably won’t arrive until later in September. This filing would signal the start of the last phase of the offering.

The company has already got the legal green light. On June 1, it stated that it has already confidentially submitted a draft S-1 form registration statement to the SEC, meaning it can proceed with the IPO deal at any time after the relevant regulator wraps up its work on the case, subject to market conditions and other factors.

Ahead of analyst meetings, Anthropic is also trying to close a $15 billion revolving credit facility, Reuters reported. Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Citi are among the banks working on the IPO. Anthropic and the banks declined to comment. The people cautioned that the schedule could still change.

Why the valuation question is live

Anthropic’s most recent private financing valued the company at roughly $965 billion, ahead of OpenAI’s $852 billion valuation. Some Anthropic backers are reportedly weighing a future worth near $2 trillion against an OpenAI target of up to $1 trillion, Cryptopolitan has reported.

The gap tracks a sharp divergence in reported growth. Citing the Wall Street Journal, Cryptopolitan reported that Anthropic’s second-quarter revenue more than doubled to $11.6 billion while OpenAI’s rose 18% to $6.7 billion. Anthropic’s annualized revenue run rate subsequently topped $65 billion by the end of July, versus more than $40 billion reported for OpenAI.

Enterprise demand trends in the same manner. Ramp’s August AI Index revealed that in July, 43.5% of US companies purchased Anthropic subscriptions or tokens, compared to 39.7% for OpenAI. Therefore, the mid-October pitch is essentially a claim that a faster growth trajectory and a modest edge in the enterprise sector can justify a valuation well above the latest valuation by Anthropic.

The cost side that could cap the multiple

The pressing issue is the amount of money Anthropic must invest to make that growth possible. Ramp discovered that in its first month Fable 5 constituted 6% of the Anthropic tokens bought by companies, and 11.4% of model expenditure, despite having the highest price tag of any model offered by the company.

The difference in prices is noticeable. Anthropic’s official Fable 5 pricing is set at $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output tokens. OpenAI lists its GPT-5.6 Sol at $4 and $20, respectively, which means that Fable prices are 2.5 times higher. To clarify, better performance does not necessarily always imply a greater need to pay for it.

The economics are getting more difficult throughout the sector. Gartner’s “Inference Paradox” predicts that while improvements in unit token economics will take place, cost per agentic workflow will increase more than five times until 2028. Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs’ James Covello remarks that the overall spending trend is both “unprecedented and unsustainable.”

At the same time, OECD research shows that quality-adjusted model prices are falling, while McKinsey’s latest State of AI survey suggests that company-wide AI deployment still lags the rapid adoption reflected in headline figures. And until Anthropic publishes its S-1 with audited financials, Morningstar notes, investors still have limited visibility into crucial measures such as gross margins, cash flow and customer concentration.

A build-out priced mostly in private

Delaying public offerings can also pose a danger. According to Forge’s private market study, Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI achieved $100 billion valuations in an average of five years, while the last generation of companies took around 16 years to do so. Therefore, most of the value that investors expected to gain after IPO is already generated while businesses stay private. Hence, going public may increasingly become the opportunity for early investors and employees to cash out, rather than the moment when growth of a company value starts taking place.

Although future returns are uncertain, overall markets are continuing to grow rapidly. According to Gartner, global expenditure on AI models and platforms will increase by 63.4% to $64.3 billion by 2026. In addition, Goldman Sachs Research states that global investments in AI this year will exceed $1 trillion and PwC’s Global Data Centre Outlook anticipates $31.6 trillion in spending through 2050.

Anthropic’s IPO will reveal whether investors are prepared to follow developments by raising money at values set in private markets. SpaceX’s June IPO worth $1.77 trillion serves as the best example to draw a comparison and, therefore, if Anthropic’s IPO reaches nearly $2 trillion, it will face immediate comparisons with the success of SpaceX.

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