Anthropic's IPO faces a market check as investors push for a $1.5 trillion valuation, not $2 trillion

Institutional investors who plan to buy shares in Anthropic's IPO have told the company and its advisers that its valuation should be around $1.5 trillion to $1.6 trillion, according to The Wall Street Journal, which cites people familiar with the matter. That is well below the figures close to $2 trillion that had circulated in recent months. The WSJ links the shift to last week's rout in technology stocks. The listing is planned for later this month.

For scale, Business Insider puts Meta's value at about $1.6 trillion, a possible target for Anthropic's IPO. Even the cautious figure would place the maker of Claude level with one of the largest companies in the world, with a fraction of its workforce.

Our thesis is that this is healthy price discovery, not a sign of weakness. Private-market valuations in AI have been set in rounds where a few strategic buyers competed for allocation. An IPO brings in investors who have to price risk across a whole portfolio, and they are reacting to a falling market. A haircut of roughly a quarter from the rumored figure is exactly how public markets are supposed to work.

Our reading: we have argued that measurement should beat marketing, both for models and for valuations. A more cautious price lowers the risk that Anthropic lists at a level that only perfect execution could justify, and it gives later investors more room to profit. It does not change the underlying business. Anthropic still leads our quality index, and its S-1 shows personnel costs falling to 15% of revenue. What remains open is how much of the AI premium survives tighter monetary and market conditions. The answer will set the tone for every frontier lab that wants to go public after Anthropic.