Anthropic Investors Rethink $2 Trillion IPO Target as Growth Decelerates

Anthropic's third-quarter numbers tell two stories at once. Revenue hit $16.8 billion, up 45% from the prior quarter, and the company posted a profit on an adjusted basis. That should be good news for a firm preparing one of the most closely watched IPOs in recent memory. Instead, some investors are walking away less confident, not more.

The reason is simple: the growth rate is decelerating, and sharply. Anthropic's revenue more than doubled from the first quarter to the second, reaching $11.6 billion. A 45% sequential gain in the third quarter looks strong by almost any normal corporate standard, but against that earlier pace, it reads as deceleration. Four people familiar with the matter told Reuters that some current and prospective investors who attended Anthropic's investor day in San Francisco on Wednesday are now discussing a valuation around $1.5 trillion, well below the roughly $2 trillion figure that had been the working assumption for the November share sale.

This is not a company in distress. It is a company whose growth curve is bending in a way that forces a harder conversation about price. At Wednesday's meeting, attendees, mostly Anthropic's most prominent investors, met directly with CEO Dario Amodei and finance chief Krishna Rao. The Information had reported earlier that investors were weighing a lower number. Anthropic did not respond to requests for comment.

Why the growth math matters

Valuation multiples for AI companies have been built on an assumption of near-vertical growth sustained indefinitely. When a company doubles revenue in a single quarter, as Anthropic did between the first and second quarters of this year, markets extrapolate that trajectory forward and price accordingly. A slowdown to 45% sequential growth, even one that still implies a run rate most software companies would envy, breaks that extrapolation. Investors are not pricing the quarter in isolation. They are pricing the second derivative, the rate of change in the growth rate itself.

That distinction explains why a company that is now profitable on an adjusted basis is still facing valuation pressure. Last year, Anthropic's revenue surged twelvefold to nearly $4.6 billion, even as it lost more than $8 billion on an operating basis, excluding writedowns tied mostly to prior fundraising. Its IPO prospectus, reviewed exclusively by Reuters in September, disclosed a $42 billion loss for 2025 and projected still more spending ahead. The company has committed to at least $518 billion in cloud services, computing and infrastructure spending over the next decade, a figure that underscores just how capital-intensive the AI buildout remains, even for the sector's strongest revenue performers.

Anthropic's position is also structurally complicated. Alphabet's Google and Amazon are simultaneously investors, suppliers of computing power, distribution partners, and competitors. That tangle of relationships has fueled Anthropic's rapid rise, but it also means the company's cost base and strategic independence are bound up with firms that have their own AI ambitions. Founded in 2021 by former OpenAI executives Dario Amodei and his sister Daniela, now Anthropic's president, the company has built one of the leading positions in generative AI with its Claude model family. None of that changes the arithmetic investors are doing this week.

The timing compounds the pressure. A broader tech selloff is already rattling markets, and it has hit AI infrastructure names hard. Shares and bonds of Nvidia-backed CoreWeave tumbled further on Thursday, reflecting growing unease about an AI buildout increasingly financed with borrowed money rather than equity or operating cash flow. When debt-fueled infrastructure bets start looking shakier, the premium investors are willing to pay for growth-stage AI equity tends to compress too. Anthropic's valuation discussion is not happening in a vacuum. It is happening alongside a market that is reassessing how much leverage the AI sector can safely carry.

The IPO calendar has already shown signs of strain elsewhere. Data center operator SB Energy delayed its listing last month. Nuclear technology company Holtec Nuclear pulled its IPO plans entirely in September. Neither company is a direct Anthropic comparable, but both signal that public market investors are demanding more conviction before committing capital to capital-intensive, infrastructure-heavy AI bets, exactly the profile Anthropic fits with its $518 billion spending commitment.

What makes Anthropic's situation distinct from those is scale and timing. This is not a company struggling to find a growth story. It is a company whose growth story, while still remarkable in absolute terms, is being measured against the almost impossible bar it set for itself earlier this year. A $1.5 trillion valuation would still rank among the largest private-to-public transitions in corporate history. It simply would not be the $2 trillion figure that had become the working consensus just weeks ago.

What Investors Should Watch

The November IPO itself is the next real test, and its reception will matter well beyond Anthropic's own cap table. Investors widely view the success of this listing as a bellwether for the broader AI financing cycle, with OpenAI's own potential listing, flagged for next year, sitting directly behind it on the runway. A soft reception for Anthropic would raise the bar, and the scrutiny, for every AI company lining up to go public afterward.

Watch three things in the coming weeks: where the final IPO price actually lands relative to the $1.5 trillion figure now under discussion, whether fourth-quarter revenue trends show growth stabilizing or continuing to decelerate, and how credit markets treat AI infrastructure debt given the CoreWeave selloff. Profitability on an adjusted basis is a genuine milestone for Anthropic, but adjusted profitability and sustainable growth rates are two different tests, and right now the market is failing the company on the second one. For a sector still priced for perfection, a growth rate that merely impresses, rather than astonishes, may be the real story here.