Anthropic's expected IPO valuation has dropped sharply, with investors now bracing for a listing well below the $2 trillion target the company had been pursuing when it filed confidentially with the SEC4. Some stakeholders told CNBC that even $1.5 trillion is in doubt, with one investor calling that number a "stretch," while others said the valuation could dip to $1 trillion. Bloomberg separately reported that Anthropic's potential valuation sank from the $2 trillion estimated in early October to a range of $1.2 trillion to $1.3 trillion1,2. The Financial Times reported on November 6 that Anthropic plans to press ahead with the IPO targeting a $1.5 trillion valuation3.
Anthropic declined to comment.
Market rout and midterm fallout
The reassessment follows a broad tech selloff. The Nasdaq fell more than 5% on November 5, its steepest single-day drop in 19 months, driven by fears that Democrats' sweep in the midterm elections and what CNBC described as a nationwide rebuke of AI will slow data-center buildout. Bearishness on the AI trade was already rising before the election, according to CNBC.
Enterprise AI spending stalls
New data from Ramp, published on November 6, adds a fundamental wrinkle. Token spend across Ramp's customer base grew only 1.5% across August and September, compared with 42% growth in July from the prior month. Companies are consuming more tokens but not spending proportionally more, a dynamic Ramp's lead economist Ara Kharazian attributed to price competition and savvier purchasing.
Kharazian told TechCrunch that the top 1% of firms by AI spend — the heaviest adopters — saw their per-employee spending dip just below $10,000 per month in August and September, down from summer peaks. A slowdown among that cohort is "sufficient to slow down revenue entirely, despite the fact that we're seeing rising volumes," he said. Ramp data showed the top 10% of firms spend $600 to $1,000 per employee per month, while median firms spend $12 to $15 per employee per month. "Almost the entire spend on AI is from venture-backed, high-growth tech companies," Kharazian said, warning that if spending slows, those companies "will all start to slow down simultaneously, and that could lead to other cascading effects".
October data showed some recovery, with token spend up 8.9% from September 23 to October 23.
Pricing pressure on both sides
The spending plateau coincides with aggressive price cuts by both leading model providers. Anthropic said in a recent filing that pricing reductions on Fable 5.1 and Opus 5.5 slashed its revenue growth by about $600 million. OpenAI cut API prices in half for GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna in September. OpenAI itself lowered its proposed valuation to $1.25 trillion from $1.4 trillion and slashed its latest fundraising goals by about $10 billion, ultimately closing roughly $11 billion at the $1.25 trillion mark[1].
ANALYSIS The convergence of a tech selloff, political headwinds for data-center expansion, and enterprise spending data showing volume growth decoupling from revenue growth puts direct pressure on the revenue multiples underpinning Anthropic's IPO pricing.
Anthropic is set to list on the Nasdaq under the ticker ANT.