A filing that could break the record
Anthropic filed its paperwork with the US Securities and Exchange Commission in late October, setting up what could become the biggest initial public offering in history. The company did not say how many shares it will sell or at what price. Reports point to a valuation of as much as $2 trillion and a debut in mid-November.
The numbers behind the filing are large. Anthropic was valued at $965 billion in May after raising $65 billion from investors. Annualised revenue rose from about $9 billion at the end of 2025 to more than $44 billion by May. Sensor Tower estimates the Claude app has more than 67 million monthly active users, against 9.4 million a year earlier. Payment data from Ramp showed 43.8% of US businesses paying for Anthropic services in September, slightly ahead of OpenAI at 40.6%.
The market it is walking into
The listing arrives after one of the hardest months for technology stocks in years. Intel plunged about 29% in a single session after guiding to a weak fourth quarter, citing soft PC demand and manufacturing bottlenecks. Amazon fell 7% after lifting 2026 capital spending to roughly $220 billion and warning of more in 2027. Alphabet lost about $500 billion in market value in one day, its worst on record. The Nasdaq-100 lost close to $1.4 trillion in October.
The worry is not that AI is unpopular. It is that the money going in has become enormous while the profit coming out is still small. Gartner expects global AI spending to reach about $3.6 trillion in 2027, up from $1.8 trillion in 2025. Companies have borrowed heavily to fund data centres, and traders now price more than 50 basis points of Federal Reserve rate rises by mid-2027, which makes that borrowing more expensive.
The safety question on the cover
Anthropic's filing also puts an unusual argument in front of public investors. Chief executive Dario Amodei has said repeatedly that advanced AI carries existential risk, and the company has published long lists of dangers it says the industry must manage. Buying the stock means betting that the same company can grow quickly and slow itself down where it judges the technology unsafe. That tension is now part of the pitch, not a footnote to it.