Anthropic's IPO slips to November as one research firm says it is worth $150 billion, not $2 trillion

Anthropic's long-awaited stock market debut has been pushed back, and its biggest skeptic so far has put a number on the gap. The listing was reportedly planned for October and has moved to November 2026. On October 7, according to a CNBC report relayed by Seoul Economic Daily the next day, the independent research firm New Constructs said Anthropic is worth about $150 billion, less than a tenth of the $2 trillion figure circulating in the market.

We keep a separate page on the Anthropic IPO, with the prospectus, the numbers and the dates. This piece covers what changed this week: the delay and the first sharp valuation challenge. Everything below that comes from the leaked document is a press report, not a filing.

What Anthropic has actually said

Very little. On June 1, 2026 the company announced that it had "confidentially submitted a draft registration statement on Form S-1" to the SEC. The notice said the filing gives Anthropic the option to go public after the SEC completes its review, and that the number of shares and the price had not been set. The notice was published under Rule 135, which limits what a company can say, so the silence is partly procedural. As of October 8, 2026 we found no public S-1.

The delay

The Decoder reported on September 20, citing the Wall Street Journal and The Information, that Anthropic was pushing its IPO from October to November, with its advisers wanting strong third-quarter results on the record first. The same report says OpenAI has postponed its own IPO to 2027. On October 6 a Motley Fool article on Yahoo Finance repeated that the date had shifted to November. Neither Anthropic nor its banks has confirmed a date in anything we opened, so treat November as reported.

The numbers behind the $2 trillion

The financial picture comes from a draft prospectus that leaked to Reuters, as summarized by Fortune on September 29, 2026. Per that account:

• 2025: revenue of $4.6 billion, operating expenses of $13 billion, an operating loss above $8 billion, a net loss of $42 billion and $20.28 billion in cash.
• 2026: revenue of $11.5 billion in the second quarter, up from $4.73 billion in the first, with an expected operating profit for a second straight quarter.
• Concentration: two customers account for about a quarter of revenue.
• Commitments: plans to spend $518 billion on cloud services and data centers.

The Motley Fool piece adds that many large clients reportedly lack long-term contracts. The Financial Times, as quoted by Fortune, says the draft warns of "the potential of increasingly advanced AI models to manipulate, blackmail and exhibit other unpredictable behaviours," and that CEO Dario Amodei devoted more than a third of the document to risk warnings, including existential risks to humanity. Fortune notes that many details are still missing.

The $150 billion argument

New Constructs, an independent US research firm, builds its case on three points, according to the Seoul Economic Daily summary of CNBC's report. First, justifying $2 trillion would take roughly double the net profit of Nvidia, which topped $190 billion over its last four quarters. Second, cheap open-source models could erode the profits of closed ones, while Anthropic's losses keep widening. Third, it sees the offering as more of a liquidity event for existing backers than a chance for ordinary investors.

There are limits to that view. New Constructs was not among the investors who received the S-1, per CNBC, and it built its estimate from media-reported financials. The fast revenue growth between the first and second quarters is the strongest counter-argument, and it comes from the same leaked draft. A bear case and a bull case drawn from one unpublished document tell you more about the document's missing pages than about the company.

The arithmetic anyone can do

Take the reported figures at face value and a few ratios follow. Second-quarter revenue of $11.5 billion, annualized, is about $46 billion, so a $2 trillion valuation is roughly 43 times that run rate, while $150 billion would be about 3.3 times. Revenue also grew about 2.4 times from the first quarter to the second. That is our arithmetic on leaked and unaudited numbers, not a forecast, and it shows why the debate is really about whether growth that fast can last. The $518 billion compute plan, set against $20.28 billion in cash at the end of 2025, is the other number that the public filing will have to explain.

What this means for the race

An IPO of this size would make Anthropic the first stand-alone frontier lab with public shareholders and quarterly disclosure duties. That changes the race in ways unrelated to the price. Risk factors, compute commitments, customer concentration and safety incidents would all become audited statements with legal consequences. It would also create a public benchmark against which OpenAI, which reportedly delayed to 2027, would be judged.

None of this is advice on whether the shares will be a good buy, and we will not give any. The facts are narrower: a delay reported, a valuation disputed, and a prospectus nobody outside the deal can read.

Our take

Read the public S-1 before reading any more valuation commentary. The things to check, in order, are quarterly revenue against the leaked figures, how the two large customers are described, the size of the compute commitments against cash, and the risk-factor language on safety. We will update our tracker when the filing goes public.