Anthropic Prepares to Push Ahead With IPO as Soon as Next Week

Anthropic plans to forge ahead with its initial public offering later this month despite recent market volatility tied to artificial-intelligence investments, the Wall Street Journal reported. The Claude maker has meetings lined up with key investors this week and is aiming for its shares to start trading Thursday or Friday next week, according to people familiar with the matter. Investors are awaiting Anthropic's targeted valuation range, which the company is expected to unveil in a filing early this week. A week ago, investors anticipated a target of about $1.5 trillion, but after Thursday's steep selloff in AI companies, some major investors are now pushing for a lower figure. The Nasdaq Composite has recovered ground since, likely giving Anthropic additional confidence to push forward. Yet the company will almost certainly need to accept a much lower valuation than the roughly $2 trillion floated months ago. It could still delay and wait for better conditions, though doing so would risk sparking panic in the market. Executives have been huddling with bankers from Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley in recent days to discuss where to set the range. Setting its sights too high could hurt investor demand and send shares lower, while too low a range could expose the company and its bankers to criticism that they left money on the table. Bankers sometimes encourage slightly lower-than-expected ranges so they can raise them later citing strong demand. The filing expected this week will spell out how many shares Anthropic plans to sell and at what price, and could reveal big-name investors already lined up to buy at the IPO price. The company plans to list on the Nasdaq under the ticker "ANT." Companies in the Nasdaq Composite shed $2.5 trillion of value on Thursday after the midterm elections swept a bloc of AI skeptics into power and passed moratoriums that could slow America's data-center development. Even before the recent volatility, enthusiasm for AI names had been waning on concerns about the scale of investment required and the lack of clarity on its payoff. Rival OpenAI raised less than half of what it initially targeted in its latest funding round, at a below-target valuation of $1.25 trillion. SpaceX's record June offering valued the rocket-maker at about $1.77 trillion and raised roughly $75 billion.