--- title: "Anthropic Would Like $100 Billion for the AI Its CEO Says Should Maybe Slow Down" description: "The biggest IPO ever may arrive in November, into a nervous market, with a prospectus that warns of existential risk" author: "Nate Ledger" published: 2026-10-05T09:00:45.650Z modified: 2026-10-06T03:20:19Z url: https://rews.cc/a/anthropic-would-like-100-billion-for-the-ai-its-ceo-says-sho-695b9d language: en tags: ["ipo", "ai", "openai", "regulation", "economy", "business", "tech"] publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)" --- # Anthropic Would Like $100 Billion for the AI Its CEO Says Should Maybe Slow Down *The biggest IPO ever may arrive in November, into a nervous market, with a prospectus that warns of existential risk* By Nate Ledger · October 5, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/anthropic-would-like-100-billion-for-the-ai-its-ceo-says-sho-695b9d ## In brief - Anthropic could raise up to $100 billion at a valuation of around $2 trillion, possibly as soon as November, per the Journal - That would top SpaceX’s record roughly $86 billion IPO, itself far ahead of Saudi Aramco’s $29 billion raise in 2019 - Reuters reported the unreleased prospectus warns Anthropic’s AI could pose a ‘catastrophic or existential risk to humanity’ - Rising rates, the Iran war shock and delays by Oura, Holtec Nuclear and OpenAI have chilled the broader IPO market - Anthropic lost $42 billion in 2025 but told investors it expects a second straight profitable quarter, the FT reported Sometime soon — possibly as early as November — Anthropic is expected to try to sell stock to the public, and the numbers being floated are not normal numbers. The company could raise as much as $100 billion at a valuation of around $2 trillion, according to the Wall Street Journal, which would install it among the ten most valuable companies on Earth. Anthropic announced in June that it had confidentially filed to go public, and CNN reports that the listing is moving forward even though, just weeks ago, Chief Executive Dario Amodei helped call for an industry-wide slowdown in AI development to better manage safety risks. So the pitch is, roughly: we build something so powerful that it might be dangerous, and we’d like you to buy it. ## The scoreboard If Anthropic raises $100 billion and debuts near $2 trillion, it would take the crown for the largest IPO ever from SpaceX, which raised roughly $86 billion and listed at a $1.77 trillion valuation — a debut itself partly powered by the company’s vision of its role in AI. Before SpaceX, the biggest offering on record was Saudi Aramco’s roughly $29 billion raise in 2019, so the record has now grown by close to a factor of three and a half in one cycle. “SpaceX was such an outlier — the world’s biggest IPO ever, by far. And it’s very possible that they’ll be in second place (roughly) a month from now,” said Jay Ritter, a professor emeritus at the University of Florida. That is a strange sentence to be able to write. The all-time record holder for raising money from public investors would hold it for about a month. ## The risk factor Reuters obtained a copy of Anthropic’s not-yet-public prospectus last week and reported that it includes a warning that the company’s AI model could potentially cause a “catastrophic or existential risk to humanity.” As we’ve [written about before](https://rews.cc/a/anthropic-prospectus-shows-42-billion-net-loss-ahead-of-poss-6f7244), that phrase now sits in a securities filing, which is where companies put things their lawyers worry about. The worry has intensified lately: scrutiny spiked after multiple incidents of AI agents going rogue and attempting to hack other systems, former Anthropic employees joined Amodei in raising concerns, and last week Amodei was among the tech leaders who signed an accord at the White House to “self-police” AI development. You can look at the prospectus warning two ways. One is that Anthropic is being admirably honest. The other, and I think the more interesting one, is a bit of financial plumbing: once shareholders own the risk, the company has priced it. Whatever existential hazard Claude poses on Monday morning is, by Monday afternoon, somebody’s portfolio problem. Either way – and this much is structural — the safety concerns would exist whether Anthropic went public or not, experts told CNN, and the company is still expected to grow and compete with OpenAI as hard as ever. ## The window, such as it is The awkward part is the timing. Interest rates are rising, bond yields have surged in recent weeks as central banks tighten to absorb the Iran war energy shock, and higher rates push down stock valuations and generally chill the IPO market. “You’ve got rising rates. You’ve got the war in Iran. You’ve got the sort of shakier economy ex-AI,” Heath Terry, head of AI investment research at Citi, told CNN. “IPOs need a stable market environment, they need positive investor sentiment, and with that sort of unstable broader economic landscape, that makes it a lot more difficult,” he said, speaking broadly rather than about any one company. Some companies have done the arithmetic quietly and left. Oura, the health-tracking ring maker, said this fall that it would go public and then announced last week that it would delay its debut over market uncertainty (we covered [that retreat](https://rews.cc/a/oura-pulls-its-ipo-as-ai-glasses-and-rings-run-into-privacy--ed5d63)); Holtec Nuclear suspended its planned IPO citing poor stock market sentiment. OpenAI [pushed its own listing into next year](https://rews.cc/a/openai-delays-i-p-o-and-seeks-30-billion-at-about-1-4-trilli-6a7239), citing AI safety concerns — which at Anthropic appear to be filed as a risk factor rather than a reason to wait. The bull case is that Anthropic is in a league of its own, as CFRA Research analyst Angelo Zino put it: the company earns revenue renting its Claude models to major businesses, it reportedly told investors it will be profitable for a second straight quarter this year, according to the Financial Times, and “I think there’s going to be a very strong appetite and demand for Anthropic,” Zino said. The cash case is blunter: Anthropic lost $42 billion in 2025 and plans to spend north of $500 billion on computing and infrastructure in the coming years, according to Reuters. A company on that burn rate does not get to be precious about the IPO calendar, Ritter and other analysts noted; waiting doesn’t guarantee lower rates, and delay risks the window closing entirely. Besides, no window is ever really clean. “You can’t really ever time an IPO to eliminate all future uncertainty with respect to your company and your product,” Jill E. Fisch of the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School told CNN. “I don’t think there’s a magic line for any company in terms of, ‘Yes, now we’ve crossed the threshold, we’ve solved all of the safety issues, and now we can go forward with 100% confidence.’ I don’t think it really works that way.” The Nasdaq Composite is trading near a record high, which helps. And AI remains the central theme lifting the market. So the ask is that investors believe Anthropic can keep monetizing its models and expanding its share, at a $2 trillion starting price. Ritter offered the cleanest summary of the whole thing: “If the company executes its business model, it’s going to do fine. But you know, a lot of times things don’t work out.”