Investors push Anthropic toward a $1.5 trillion IPO valuation as the tech selloff cools expectations

Institutional investors planning to take part in Anthropic's initial public offering have told the company and its advisers that the valuation should sit around $1.5 trillion to $1.6 trillion. The Wall Street Journal reports this, citing people familiar with the matter. Figures closer to $2 trillion had been circulating in recent months. According to the WSJ, the push for a lower number follows last week's selloff in technology stocks. The listing is planned for later this month.

The gap is not small. The difference between $1.5 trillion and $2 trillion is about $400–500 billion, more than the market value of most listed companies. Even at the lower end, Anthropic would debut at roughly the size Business Insider attributes to Meta, around $1.6 trillion. That would put it among the most valuable companies in the world on day one.

Our thesis is that this is a healthy correction, not a crack in the story. Anthropic's fundamentals look strong in its own filing: revenue running far ahead of personnel costs, and revenue per employee well above that of the incumbent tech giants. In our own quality index, its frontier model leads the field. But a business can be excellent and still be priced too high. Institutional buyers asking for a discount after a market rout are doing their job. They are pricing in execution risk, energy and compute costs (which the S-1 itself flags), and the fact that profitability for frontier labs remains, in many analysts' view, some way off.

Our reading: a more disciplined IPO is good for the long-term trajectory of AI. Valuations detached from fundamentals tend to end in sharp reversals that starve the whole sector of capital, including the research that drives progress in medicine and science. A $1.5 trillion listing still signals extraordinary confidence in what these systems will do. It just removes some of the froth. Watch the final pricing and the first weeks of trading. They will be the clearest public test yet of how much the market believes AI revenue will compound.