Anthropic’s debut on public markets will be unlike any that’s come before it, in ways that amount to either a once-in-a-generation opportunity — or a massive financial gamble, depending on whom you ask.The startup behind the Claude AI assistant on Tuesday set a price range for its initial public offering of $70 to $78. If it prices at the midpoint, Anthropic will raise $61 billion in its IPO.
That combined with options and unvested stock would value the company at roughly $1.1 trillion. At the top of the range, Anthropic could be worth $1.4 trillion.The IPO is expected to take place late next week, two sources with knowledge of the situation told CNN, although they cautioned the date could move.
Anthropic declined to comment on the timing.RELATED STORY | Anthropic is reportedly rapidly accelerating AI development amid slowdown callsThere will be no analog to measure Anthropic’s performance against when it begins trading. The market has simply never seen a dedicated AI model developer go public.
It is rare for a business to IPO as a public benefit corporation and, other than SpaceX, it is unheard of for any company to go public with a target valuation above $1 trillion.Anthropic’s IPO, expected to begin marketing to investors this week, is unconventional by almost any measure.
The company promised in its pre-IPO regulatory filing that its technology would “bring forth an age of miracles” while simultaneously warning it may doom humanity.
Still, the promise of a once-in-a-generation technological revolution (even with 90 pages of warnings and caveats in its more-than-300-page filing) could make Anthropic the biggest IPO in history.But there are other financial superlatives and quirks — not to mention persistent cold feet about AI on Wall Street — that will keep many investors on the sidelines.Bills keep coming dueDespite rapid revenue growth, the
five-year-old company has had only one quarter of operating profit, and it is on the hook for nearly $900 billion over the next few years — money it has committed to spend on computer power and data center infrastructure.Anthropic fans have held up its sales growth as a positive indicator of its financial health: The company brought in $17 billion in sales in the most recent quarter, up 1,127% from the same period a
year earlier.
And in the first nine months of this year, it recorded $33.2 billion in sales, versus just $4.6 billion in all of 2025.But by Anthropic’s own account, that kind of growth isn’t sustainable over the long term.“We do not expect our revenue will continue to grow at comparable rates, and we cannot assure you that it will continue to grow at all,” the company said in its pre-IPO prospectus.At the same time, Anthropic
relied on just five customers for a quarter of its sales this year.
It didn’t disclose the five, but noted that some of them are also competitors.That points to a precarious situation in which a handful of companies have outsized control over Anthropic’s future cash flow. Any one of those companies, which may be building its own AI models to compete with Claude, may decide to scale back its own spending or walk away completely at any time.
Ideally, investors would want to see a more robust customer base.IN CASE YOU MISSED IT | ‘Gambling with our lives’: Another AI employee quits over safety concernsEven bullish investors say that so-called concentration risk is worth keeping an eye on.Paul Marino, chief revenue officer at Themes ETFs, told CNN the relatively…
