Five weeks ago, people were talking about Anthropic's IPO at $2 trillion. Now the funds expected to anchor the deal are haggling, and their timing is excellent.

Three major investors who plan to buy in told the Wall Street Journal that the roughly $1.5 trillion target will likely have to come down. One said closer to $1 trillion. Another suggested Anthropic could simply wait. A smaller raise is also on the table. None of that was in the plan.

The buyers have leverage. The S&P 500 fell 4.4% on November 5, FinanceFeeds noted, taking about $3 trillion in U.S. market value with it. Nasdaq Composite companies lost $2.5 trillion of that by themselves, according to Yahoo Finance, which quoted Truist's Keith Lerner calling it "a buyers' strike in tech." That is a bad backdrop for the largest stock sale anyone has tried.

Officially, nothing has changed. No valuation has been cut, Anthropic declined to comment, and executives and advisers are due to meet in the coming days. They won't be short meetings.

The price is being negotiated in public

By Friday morning the number had slipped again. Prospective buyers are discussing $1.2 trillion to $1.3 trillion, Bloomberg reported, down from the $1.4 trillion to $1.5 trillion that came out of Anthropic's own investor briefings.

That's about $700 billion off the early-October talk, and Anthropic hasn't even published a price range. Most companies at least get to name a number before buyers start marking it down.

There is a generous reading. Investing.com argued that the Bloomberg range shows bankers still hunting for a price that clears. HSBC's Max Kettner told Bloomberg Radio that a price near $1 trillion might be the safer play, since it lowers the odds of an ugly first month of trading. A cheaper IPO is easier to love.

The crypto crowd got there first

Liquid's ANTH perpetual, which quotes one point per $1 billion of implied valuation, traded at $1,738.25 on November 2, or about $1.74 trillion. Its market page has since shown it near $1,692.

Nobody should mistake these for a price. They're cash-settled bets with no shares and no allocation attached, and their volume would be a rounding error in a $100 billion order book. Still, they've been pointing the same way as the institutions for a week. So has Polymarket, where bettors now lean toward a December listing.

The most important number in the filing is a blank

Anthropic's growth isn't in dispute. Third-quarter revenue was about $17 billion, against $1.4 billion a year earlier, and the company had $146.6 billion in cash at the end of September, Yahoo Finance reported from the amended filing.

What's missing is October. The S-1/A filed November 2 leaves an empty space where the latest run-rate figure should go, FourWeekMBA pointed out. Investors want that number to see whether growth came back after a recent slowdown. For now, they're asked to take it on faith.

The closest thing to an answer arrived secondhand. The Journal reported that the run rate topped $80 billion at the end of October, citing one person familiar with the matter. One anonymous source, for the number the whole valuation leans on.

Take it at face value and $1 trillion is 12.5 times run-rate revenue. At $1.5 trillion, it's nearly 19. You pay multiples like that for a company that's still speeding up. Whether Anthropic is still speeding up is what the blank line won't say.

The first half doesn't help the optics. Anthropic booked $16.3 billion in revenue and an $80.7 billion net loss, CNBC reported. Most of that loss was a non-cash charge from revaluing financing instruments, and the third-quarter operating loss was a more modest $567 million. That context matters. Good luck fitting it in a headline.

The bills are bigger than the raise

Anthropic disclosed about $895.4 billion in purchase commitments and leases, nearly all of it for compute, Investing.com reported. About $447.5 billion is expected by the end of 2030. Close to $70 billion is due in the 12 months after September 30.

The biggest checks go to suppliers, and in a few cases to rivals:

  • Broadcom: about $161.2 billion in five-year TPU equipment leases

  • Google: at least $121.3 billion in hosting through mid-2033, up from $114.5 billion in the first filing

  • SpaceX: up to $120.5 billion for Nvidia GPU compute, or about $3.1 billion a month once all the capacity arrives

  • Amazon: at least $110 billion through April 2036

  • Microsoft: at least $44.9 billion

Not all of it is equally fixed. Google and Amazon are minimums with true-ups, SpaceX comes with cancellation rights and Broadcom is lease rent. The filing warns that if financing dries up or gets more expensive, contracted capacity could be delayed, repriced or never delivered.

That puts a lot of weight on borrowing costs. Blackstone has warned that Anthropic may not land an investment-grade rating after the listing, Benzinga reported, which would push them higher.

Even a full $100 billion raise is closer to a down payment. Back in October, The Motley Fool estimated that $100 billion would cover about 24% of the more fixed part of Anthropic's planned compute spending.

What comes next

The plan was a roadshow starting the week of November 9, then Nasdaq trading under the ticker ANT the week after, all before Thanksgiving on November 26, according to FinanceFeeds. Investors doubt the roadshow can start on time, Reuters reported, citing four people familiar with the talks.

None of the options are free. Anthropic can go next week and take what the market offers. It can slip by days or weeks and run into the holiday freeze. Or it can wait for 2027, which means full-year financials, an updated S-1 and another round of SEC review.

Even the record is in play. One investor told the Journal the raise could come in around $80 billion instead of up to $100 billion. That would fall short of the roughly $86 billion SpaceX raised in June, and the biggest IPO ever would become the second biggest.

Other deals are waiting on this one. OpenAI has ruled out a 2026 IPO, and some of its prospective backers want to see where Anthropic prices first, the Financial Times reported.

Our take

If your company buys Claude at scale, nothing about this week changes your contract. The commitments are worth a read before your next renewal, though. A vendor with roughly $70 billion due over the next year has good reason to push for bigger volumes and longer terms.

Watch for the October figure in the next amendment. A run rate comfortably above $80 billion would put the slowdown worry to rest. Another blank would tell you something too.

Don't plan around the pre-IPO perps. They're thin, leveraged and settled in cash, and they say more about crypto traders' moods than about what a 22-bank syndicate can sell.

Anthropic can still pull off a record IPO. It may have to fill in a blank first.