Goldman Sachs positions itself for Anthropic's IPO, with a $2 trillion valuation nobody has yet confirmed

By Zendoric · September 8, 2026.

Goldman Sachs has completed several fixed-income issues in recent days: bonds with different maturities and coupons, among them callable senior notes (redeemable by the bank itself before maturity) with terms running out to 2046. In parallel, as reported by Simply Wall St, the bank is listed alongside Morgan Stanley and other institutions among those selected for a stabilization role in Anthropic's planned stock market debut, a deal put at a valuation of some US$2 trillion.

Neither Anthropic nor the banks mentioned have publicly confirmed that figure; it comes from an equity analysis piece focused on Goldman, not from an official statement by the AI company. It deserves the caution owed to any valuation of a private company that has not yet set a placement price: over the past two years, the valuations of the big AI labs have climbed through successive rounds at a pace that real revenue rarely keeps up with.

The stabilization role, for anyone unfamiliar with market jargon, is the responsibility reserved for the lead banks in an offering: buying or selling shares on the secondary market during the first days of trading to smooth out the volatility of the debut. That Goldman and Morgan Stanley are in that position, if confirmed, is no minor detail: it is confirmation that the most traditional investment banking is staking its reputation and its capital on the deal going well. Goldman's debt issuance, for its part, answers to a different logic and does not depend on the IPO: it is the usual way a bank funds its own balance sheet to support the underwriting and trading activities that make up its recurring business.

Placed side by side, the two pieces of news capture the moment well: Wall Street is stockpiling balance-sheet ammunition just as it competes for a seat at the table for the largest equity deal ever contemplated for an AI lab. Winning that mandate is not just a matter of fees —probably among the largest ever paid to place a stock— but of becoming the go-to counterpart for the next generation of tech giants, precisely when those labs are starting to move more capital than many sovereign wealth funds.

Our reading goes beyond Goldman Sachs as a stock. That an AI lab is preparing to go public, at whatever scale, confirms that private rounds are no longer enough to fund the spending on data centers and compute capacity required to train and serve frontier models; public markets are the next rung for raising that capital. There is good news there for Zendoric's long-term thesis: the more infrastructure gets financed, the sooner the horizon of abundance we defend comes into view, with more compute available for medical and scientific research and for making artificial intelligence itself cheaper. But the short term carries its own risk: a valuation that would rival those of the largest tech companies on the planet, without a trading history or public quarterly results to back it up yet, is exactly the ground where the bubbles several investors have been flagging in the sector take root. That the most traditional banks are putting their prestige on the line stabilizing that debut confirms just how far the fortunes of Wall Street and those of generative AI are already intertwined, for better and for worse.