Why I’m Skipping the Anthropic IPO

Yesterday, Anthropic filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for its initial public offering (IPO).

It may very well prove to be the most incredible ascent of a private company into a publicly traded company.

The ticker for Anthropic will be ANT.

The fact that it filed for its IPO certainly comes as no surprise.

This June, Anthropic made it public that it had confidentially submitted a draft registration with the SEC.

This allowed Anthropic to collect feedback on the filing, which helped it prepare for the formal filing of its Form S-1 in preparation for its IPO.

Source: Securities Exchange Commission

All indications are that the frontier AI leader is aggressively pushing toward its IPO, which is expected to happen in November, before Thanksgiving.

Goldman Sachs has been named the lead underwriter for the role, followed by Morgan Stanley, which will act as the stabilization agent to manage the trading in the hours that follow the listing.

No – this isn’t a normal tech IPO.

Zero to a Trillion in 5 Years

Anthropic was only recently founded in 2021, with its first institutional raise of $124 million that May – at a $461 million post-money valuation.

Since then, it has been like a rocket ship.

By 2023, every subsequent raise was measured in billions, culminating in the $65 billion Series H raise this May – at a $965 billion post-money valuation.

From zero to nearly a trillion-dollar valuation in the span of about five years. Just incredible.

Anthropic has already raised almost $127 billion to date.

And that’s before the IPO.

The Biggest IPO Ever?

The IPO registration suggests that Anthropic will look to raise an additional $75 billion from the IPO…

But there are already rumors that the final number will exceed $100 billion.

And depending on where the IPO prices, it will happen at a valuation somewhere around $1.5–2 trillion.

This compares to the SpaceX (SPCX) IPO, currently the largest in history, which pulled in $85.7 billion. That includes the exercised green shoe option, at a $1.77 trillion valuation.

Anthropic (ANT) has a genuine shot at exceeding SpaceX on both amount raised and valuation at the time of the IPO.

By way of comparison, SpaceX was founded in 2002 and underwent countless institutional raises, secondary transactions, and debt deals that all led to it becoming a publicly traded company.

It was a difficult, challenging, and extraordinary 24-year journey of a company that has literally enabled the private-space economy, has become one of the largest hyperscalers on the planet, and also has created one of the leading frontier AI models competing in the race for artificial super intelligence (ASI). Thus, it’s one of Anthropic’s key competitors.

Unlike developing the world’s first reusable rockets, developing software is remarkably easier and can scale far faster than a hardware company.

This is why Anthropic has been able to achieve such extraordinary scale and valuations in a matter of five years, when it took SpaceX 24 years to do the same.

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Growth at a Staggering Loss

The Anthropic S-1 filing revealed that the AI company generated $16.3 billion in revenue for the first half of 2026, compared to just $1.2 billion for the first half of 2025.

Unlike SpaceX, what’s striking is that Anthropic reported an $80.7 billion net loss in the first half of 2026, compared to a $13 billion net loss for the same period in 2025.

What has Wall Street excited, however, is that Anthropic is generating positive operating cash flow in the first half of this year, 85% gross margins, and $16.8 billion in third-quarter revenues.

Despite the massive losses being incurred by Anthropic, the general sentiment is that there is a path toward profitability in the years ahead.

The indications are that Anthropic will begin marketing its IPO the week of November 9th, which suggests a possible IPO at the end of that week or early in the week of November 16th.

Either way, that’s right around the corner.

Regardless of Anthropic’s torrid growth in revenue, this kind of offering is deeply concerning to me from a retail investor perspective.

If we assume $55 billion in revenue in 2026 and a $1.5 trillion valuation at the IPO, Anthropic would go public at 27 times 2026 revenues.

At a $2 trillion valuation, that would mean 36 times 2026 revenues.

That’s for a grossly unprofitable company, burning through cash, in an extremely competitive environment.

We should acknowledge that OpenAI, Google (GOOGL), and SpaceX (SPCX) all have very competitive offerings and, on some metrics, exceed Anthropic’s performance.

There is far from any guarantee that Anthropic will win the race to superintelligence given the competitive field.

A Deal Built for the Insiders

Going public at such inflated valuations – established on the hype around an Anthropic IPO and what retail investors will be willing to pay – is deeply concerning to me.

Venture capitalists, private equity, Anthropic management and employees, and hedge funds will be reaping extraordinary rewards at the IPO, almost certainly at the expense of retail investors.

While the details of the lockup expiration window(s) have not yet been shared publicly, I suspect they’ll design something with a phased lockup expiration to spread out the opportunity for liquidity.

Either way, there will be very strong downward pressure on the stock in the first six months of trading.

Knowing what we know now, this is not an IPO that I would recommend buying into as a retail investor.

Valuation and context are everything when assessing whether or not to buy in.

And the ANT deal is very difficult to get excited about.

With that said, as institutional capital experiences such extraordinary profits and liquidity, we can be sure that a large portion of those returns will be reinvested back into the industry and the next generation of AI innovators…

Those that are building the next models, applications, intelligent robotics, and hardware that will power the most extraordinary productivity boom in world history.

Jeff