Anthropic prices IPO at $70–$78, below $2 trillion hopes

Anthropic's expected price range lands well below the roughly $2 trillion projection bullish investors and analysts floated over the summer, and it means the company would fall short of the largest-IPO-in-history title now held by SpaceX, which priced its June IPO at $1.77 trillion. The backdrop includes a third-quarter revenue picture that is strong in absolute terms — $17 billion, up more than 1,100% year over year — but shows a marked sequential slowdown. Growth was 47% quarter over quarter, versus 144% in the second quarter.

Compute sits at the center of the story. Anthropic carries nearly a trillion dollars in committed compute-related spending in its most recent S-1 filing, and Prosor said demand for compute is expected to keep meaningfully outpacing supply across the chain. Aman Verjee of Practical Venture Capital said the combination of astronomical compute spending and slowing third-quarter revenue has given prospective buyers pause, alongside a broader market sell-off tied to political headwinds in Congress in key data-center states such as Texas, Georgia and Ohio — and last week's midterm results could spell trouble for the data center buildout.

Anthropic has also been trying to build buzz ahead of the listing. On Monday it debuted new models, Fable 5.2 and Mythos 5.2, which it says are 20% cheaper than rival OpenAI's flagship GPT-6 Astra while claiming superior performance. On Tuesday it released workplace tools aimed at non-coding roles, a suite that could threaten Microsoft's grip on white-collar work. Lithos Capital's Bastiaan Janmaat said the lower valuation does not signal weakness, pointing to recent advances.