Anthropic Is Racing to Price Its IPO Before the Thanksgiving Dealmaking Freeze

Anthropic is gearing up for one of the largest initial public offerings (IPOs) in history, and its public debut could make waves across the broader stock market. Investors probably won't have to wait long for the company's IPO and the resulting fervor.

The company is reportedly aiming to carry out its public debut before Thanksgiving, getting ahead of the informal freeze on dealmaking that tends to immediately precede and follow the holiday. While it's possible that the public debut could slip into early December, itself a popular window for companies going public, signs point to the company conducting its IPO in mid-November.

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Will Anthropic become the biggest IPO in history?

In June, Space Exploration Technologies had its IPO and listed its first batch of publicly available stock at a price of $135 per share. The listing price valued the company at $1.77 trillion -- a level that made SpaceX's IPO the largest ever. While there were expectations that Anthropic would price its stock at a level that would value the company at roughly $2 trillion and set a new valuation record, that's now looking less likely.

Following some recent volatility for the broader market, concerns about valuations in the artificial intelligence (AI) industry, and updates on Anthropic's business momentum, many analysts expect the company to debut at a valuation of roughly $1.5 trillion. Some estimates suggest that the company could be valued as low as $1.2 trillion at its IPO.

According to a leaked draft version of the company's IPO prospectus, Anthropic generated roughly $16.3 billion in sales across this year's first half -- up from sales of roughly $1.1 billion across the same period last year. That's incredible growth and reflects surging demand for the company's Claude AI software suite, which offers top-tier tools for coding, analysis, and other forms of content generation. On the other hand, the business posted a loss of roughly $80.7 billion in the first half of 2026.

Investors also took a measured approach to reports about the company's third-quarter performance, which suggested that sales in the period had increased 45% on a sequential basis to reach $16.8 billion. While that still represents an incredible rate of growth, some analysts had been expecting the rate of expansion to be even stronger given the momentum across the first half of the year.

Even though Anthropic is unlikely to dethrone SpaceX in terms of IPO size, there's still a good chance that the company will conduct a successful public debut next month. With the company using lots of cash as it spends on compute resources and scales rapidly, going public will provide the AI leader with an influx of capital that can be used to fuel its growth.

Keith Noonan has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.