Investors are tempering their valuation expectations for Anthropic's initial public offering over a slowdown in the company's revenue growth, Reuters reported on Saturday, citing sources — a notable shift in tone for a listing that has been billed as potentially the largest in stock market history.
The Reuters report lands in the middle of the lab's investor roadshow period. Anthropic began showing its third-quarter financials to institutional investors earlier this month ahead of a targeted November debut, and the company has been widely reported to be pursuing a valuation in the neighborhood of $2 trillion, which would make it the largest IPO ever completed. Yahoo Finance UK reported Friday that valuation expectations were cooling as revenue growth slowed, and TheStreet framed the development as Anthropic's "$2 trillion IPO dream" hitting "a new reality."
Anthropic did not immediately respond to the valuation reports, and the company has not publicly confirmed a final price range for the offering.
For ongoing coverage of the IPO and every other major development in the AI industry, follow our AI business news coverage as the story evolves.
The Growth Question at the Center
The core of investor caution, according to Reuters, is the trajectory rather than the size of Anthropic's revenue. The company reported third-quarter revenue of $16.8 billion, a 45% jump, and has posted back-to-back profitable quarters — figures that were shared with institutional investors earlier in October. Those are extraordinary numbers by any standard; the question being raised in investor meetings is whether the pace of expansion is decelerating from earlier growth rates as the market for large language models matures and competition intensifies.
That scrutiny is playing out against a crowded field. OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra has been pressing Anthropic's enterprise lead, Chinese open-weight labs are undercutting on price, and corporate buyers increasingly run multi-vendor evaluations before committing spend. A slowdown from triple-digit growth to 45% would still be the envy of most of the software industry, but for a company priced for perfection, the deceleration itself is the story.
A Listing Carrying Enormous Expectations
Anthropic's path to a November window has been building for months. The company filed IPO paperwork with Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs leading the process, published a prospectus that warned in unusually blunt terms about existential risk from the technology it builds, and has been showing investors financials that would make it the most valuable public listing on record if current ambitions hold.
The company has also been assembling the infrastructure commitments that underpin those numbers. Reuters reported Friday that Anthropic signed a lease for its first Canadian data center, and the Financial Times reported that Anthropic is offering Blackstone double-digit yields in a chip-financing deal. Broadcom has separately been reported to be lending Anthropic billions against future chip leases, part of a web of financing arrangements that converts the lab's compute needs into structured debt — arrangements that work as long as revenue growth does, and that magnify the risk if it does not.
Why This IPO Matters Beyond Anthropic
The offering is widely viewed as the clearest public test of how much appetite exists for AI valuations at the very top of the market. A successful mega-IPO at or near a $2 trillion valuation would validate the spending supercycle sweeping the industry — data centers, chips, and power deals measured in the hundreds of billions. A down-priced or delayed debut would hand ammunition to the growing camp of investors who argue that AI revenues cannot yet support the balance sheets being built around them.
Anthropic has already pushed its timeline once, delaying the offering to November to line up third-quarter results for the investor pitch, so the market will be watching two things in particular: whether the company holds the November window, and where underwriters eventually set the price range relative to the $2 trillion ambition.
Neither Reuters nor the other outlets reporting the cooling expectations named the investors involved, and valuation expectations at this stage of a roadshow routinely shift in both directions. But for a company that has spent 2026 positioning itself as the safest pair of hands in frontier AI, the message from the money side of the table is that safety of narrative does not exempt it from arithmetic.
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