Three major investors planning to participate in Anthropic’s initial public offering have told The Wall Street Journal that the company’s expected $1.5 trillion valuation may need to be reduced. One investor suggested a valuation closer to $1 trillion following a sharp sell-off in artificial intelligence stocks. Final IPO valuations are typically settled through bookbuilding, the process in which institutional investors indicate how much stock they are willing to buy and at what price, so early pushback from cornerstone investors often leads issuers to trim pricing targets or deal size.

Anthropic filed last month to list on Nasdaq under the ticker ANT and has been aiming to go public during the week before Thanksgiving, according to the Journal. The company plans to raise as much as $100 billion, although one investor told the newspaper that the offering could instead raise about $80 billion — a sum that would far exceed the roughly $29 billion raised in Saudi Aramco’s 2019 listing, the largest IPO on record. Another questioned whether Anthropic might delay the IPO until market conditions improve.

Anthropic executives and advisers are expected to meet in the coming days to discuss the plans, the report said. The company’s public IPO filing followed earlier reports that it was seeking a valuation of around $2 trillion. Decrypt reported in September that a leaked draft filing had indicated that target.

The uncertainty follows a broad market decline on Thursday after the U.S. midterm elections. Investors were weighing whether Democratic gains could lead to stricter oversight of data center construction. The S&P 500 closed down 4.4%, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 fell 6.3%. Both indexes recorded their worst sessions since April 2025. The Philadelphia semiconductor index declined 12.3%, and Nvidia fell 9.2%, NBC News reported.

Stocks partially recovered on Friday morning. As of 11:21 a.m. ET, the Nasdaq Composite was up 1.4% and Nvidia had gained 3.4%, according to Yahoo Finance.

Democrats are planning legislation that would protect consumers from rising electricity costs associated with data centers, require independent testing of advanced AI systems and clarify when AI companies can be held liable for harm, Reuters reported. The legislation would likely face significant obstacles while Trump remains in the White House. The party also plans closer scrutiny of leading AI companies, including Anthropic.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has called for a “national data center moratorium.” Texas governor-elect Gina Hinojosa has pledged to pause data center approvals in a state that accounts for more than a quarter of planned U.S. data center capacity, CNBC reported. Data centers house the computing capacity used to train and run AI models, which is why their electricity demand and permitting have become focal points of AI policy debates.

A delay to Anthropic’s IPO is an “escalating risk” in the current environment, technology analyst Richard Windsor told The Telegraph. “A postponement would protect against near-term valuation risks and would be more likely if the correction sustains over a longer period,” said Nalin Patel, an analyst at PitchBook, according to the newspaper.

Some investors want to review Anthropic’s October results before concluding that the valuation will be cut. The company’s annualized revenue run rate exceeded $80 billion at the end of October — a metric that extrapolates recent monthly revenue across a full year — and it held $146.6 billion in cash as of September 30, according to the Journal.

Prediction-market odds shift

Traders have reduced their expectations for an imminent listing. On Polymarket, the odds that Anthropic would list by November 20 stood at 43% on Friday, while the probability of a listing by the end of the year was 71%.

On Kalshi, where traders wager on when Anthropic will officially confirm its IPO, the odds of an announcement before December 1 fell 15 percentage points to 59%. The chance of an announcement before January 1 declined to 68%.

On Decrypt Predict, a prediction market developed by Decrypt’s parent company, Dastan, traders also assigned a 71% probability to an Anthropic IPO before 2027. The related prediction market tracks which companies will go public before that date.

Disclosure: This article was drafted with the assistance of Claude, an AI model developed by Anthropic.