Anthropic Moves Ahead With IPO Despite Market Turmoil

Anthropic is pressing on with plans to go public, according to TechCrunch, which cited a report in The Wall Street Journal. The AI company intends to announce a valuation range some time this week and expects its shares to begin trading on either Thursday or Friday of next week.

The decision comes at a turbulent moment. The listing push follows one of the largest sell-offs Nasdaq has seen, and it lands amid disclosures that a chief executive at the center of the AI boom had a relationship with a person suspected of spying for China.

How the market prices Anthropic is likely to be read as a signal of how much appetite investors still have for AI companies. According to the Journal, some institutional backers now want a valuation lower than the $1.5 trillion figure that was under discussion as recently as last week. That number was already well down from the $2 trillion that had been floated a few months earlier.

The comparison with OpenAI, Anthropic's chief competitor, adds context. OpenAI was reported last week to carry a valuation of $1.25 trillion after raising $11 billion in new funding. That sum fell short of the $20 billion the ChatGPT maker had originally set out to collect.

Anthropic has not publicly confirmed the timing or the valuation figures. The details in the Journal report describe internal planning rather than final terms, and the range set this week will be the first official indication of what the company and its advisers believe the business is worth.

For technology watchers, the listing offers a rare public measure of a company built squarely around large language models. Rivals and investors alike have had few hard numbers to work with as private AI valuations climbed, and a public price would give the sector a benchmark that anyone can track.