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The tech industry needs this to go well. So does Wall Street. Anthropic's IPO filing on Monday puts the Claude creator in position to pursue what could be the largest initial stock offering in history. Investors are already measuring the 5-year-old company's potential market cap in the trillions, putting it in a category with the world's most valuable companies. It's a critical moment for the whole tech sector, as the artificial intelligence boom has been largely driven by two companies: Anthropic and OpenAI. The latter has confidentially filed to go public, but has said a debut likely won't take place until 2027. Meanwhile, the stock market is showing signs of jitters on the AI trade. Neoclouds and data center companies have been getting pummeled, prompting Australia's Firmus to withdraw its IPO plans and for SK Hynix's U.S.-based Solidigm unit to do the same. Now, all eyes turn to Anthropic, which is betting that investors will look past over $80 billion in losses in the first half of the year, and see the 14-fold increase in revenue as a reflection of seemingly insatiable demand for the company's leading models and services. "If it underperforms expectations, it'll be a little bit of a house of cards," said Jai Das, co-founder of Sapphire Ventures whose career in tech investing dates to the 1990s. Anthropic's business is deeply entwined with tech megacaps. Close to half its revenue comes from Claude being sold through cloud divisions at Microsoft, Amazon and Alphabet, which all hold investments in the company. In the IPO, some $77 billion in notes can be issued to Amazon, Broadcom and Google, while Microsoft and Nvidia agreed to invest $15 billion as the company builds up its computing capacity. Chips from Nvidia, Advanced Micro Devices, Amazon and Google are powering Anthropic's development. Cloud providers are ratcheting up capital expenditures to meet demand, and memory manufacturers are fighting shortages to prioritize AI chips. And there's the debt factor. Alphabet, with its investment-grade credit rating, committed to backstopping Anthropic for a data center in Texas. Broadcom, which helps Google develop chips for AI labs, is creating financing pools to help Anthropic and OpenAI deploy high-performance models, CEO Hock Tan told analysts earlier this year. For public market investors, more than one-third of the value of the S&P 500 comes from tech's trillion-dollar companies, which are all, to varying degrees, going deep in AI. Beyond that, there are software giants like Adobe and Salesforce that have integrated with Anthropic's Claude assistant. Market reset? And in the private markets, check sizes have ballooned but IPOs are few and far between. Bessemer Venture Partners and Menlo Ventures both told CNBC that Anthropic is their biggest investment ever. "If they don't perform well, they will become the bellwether for AI," said Brad Bernstein, a managing partner at growth equity firm FTV Capital. "Their valuation will reflect that performance variation, and then it'll just be a trickle-down effect to all the stuff going on with the excess capital that's getting poured into the venture AI world. Everything is going to have to sort of be reset." Anthropic will be the third company to go public with a valuation above $1 trillion, after Saudi Aramco and Elon Musk's SpaceX, which debuted in June. OpenAI could be the fourth. Revenue at Anthropic has been multiplying at a staggering pace as businesses adopt the company's coding and productivity tools. Second-quarter revenue soared to $11.56 billion from $787 million a year earlier. The company held almost $132 billion in cash, equivalents and short-term investments at the end of June. And after five quarters of operating losses, Anthropic reported $974 million in operating income for the second quarter. "It is, I think, better than feared," said Rohit Kulkarni, partner and chief AI officer at Burnham Park Capital Markets, referring to the financials. "There could have been more negative tidbits." One source of concern in some corners of the investing universe is the emergence of so-called open-weight models, which are cheaper for businesses to access and allow for customization and flexibility in terms of where users access the models. In the prospectus, the only two competitors Anthropic named were OpenAI and Google, though the company said it faces competition from a "broader set of model providers," including open-weight or open-source models. Anthropic says it's all very early, with Fortune 500 companies committing less than 0.1% of their total expenses to its models and services in the latest quarter. Michael Monaghan, portfolio manager at Founder ETFs, says that's part of the investment thesis. "I think there's going to be room for frontier models like Anthropic and OpenAI and SpaceX, and I think there will be room for open-weight models," Monaghan said. "It's way too soon to say that one is going to disintermediate the other." With hyperscaler spending on AI infrastructure set to reach into the trillions of dollars, Sapphire's Das said there's understandable concern about a market glut. But he compares it to the telecommunications and dot-com bubble of the late 1990s, when companies flooded the market with fiber-optic equipment. Eventually, the infrastructure got used, although plenty of companies went belly up in the interim. "Long term, I don't think there is a lack of demand," Das said. Downside risks A lackluster debut could push out OpenAI's offering even further and cause investors to rethink its lofty valuation. At the same time, rising interest rates mean it's getting costlier for companies to raise debt. David Trainer, CEO of financial research firm New Constructs, wrote in a report last month that the AI boom has been built on the view that cheap credit and access to the capital markets will be "readily available." "If AI liquidity dries up, and there are clear signs it is, we see large, 20%, downside risk in the S&P 500, with most of that concentrated in the valuation of AI-related stocks," Trainer wrote. Industry experts take a different approach, focusing on the power and rapid proliferation of the technology. Claude Opus 5.5 Max performs better than any other model on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, an industry benchmark. Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy said the technology is only becoming more essential. "Anthropic and OpenAI have by now demonstrated their ability to stay at the frontier of AI and keep pushing innovation," Ramaswamy said. "They're incredible companies that are doing a big service to humanity by expanding the frontier of what is possible, and we are very much rooting for them to be public and very successful companies." Still, Snowflake is experimenting with low-cost open-weight models from China's Moonshot AI, DeepSeek and Zhipu. "We spend a lot on internal AI because we want to get as much efficiency as we can," Ramaswamy said. WATCH: Seems like Anthropic will beat OpenAI to IPO, says FirstMark's Rick Heitzmann
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