Anthropic Said to Postpone IPO to Just Before Midterms

Anthropic is reportedly pushing back its initial public offering (IPO) to late October.

The artificial intelligence company had been expected to release its IPO prospectus as soon as this week, Reuters reported Friday (Sept. 4), citing sources familiar with the matter.

That move, a critical step that would set off the closing stages of the listing, is now not expected until late September, the sources said. Anthropic is expected to start marketing the IPO in mid-October at the earliest, completing the listing days ahead of the U.S. midterm elections, the sources told Reuters.

PYMNTS has contacted Anthropic for comment but has not yet gotten a reply. The company declined to comment when reached by Reuters.

As Reuters noted, companies often alter their IPO calendars as they deal with market conditions and regulatory oversight, so this change is not unusual. The report added that this shift delays what some investors have claimed could be one of the largest IPOs ever attempted at $2 trillion, and a key test of the market’s appetite for AI.

Anthropic hopes to finalize a $15 billion revolving credit facility as part of its IPO process. According to one of Reuters’ sources, the company from there will meet with analysts, including those from banks taking part in the financing.

While companies usually wait a few weeks to make their IPO prospectus public after analysts meetings, this source said Anthropic is expected to have a shorter window as analysts are already well familiar with the startup.

The company’s IPO could come alongside other potential AI listings, including that of OpenAI. SpaceX, which listed earlier this year at a $1.77 trillion valuation.

In other AI news, last week saw a report that while adoption of the technology is spreading, the money is accumulating among just a handful of companies.

New Ramp data shows that the top 1% of customers make up 80% of the enterprise revenue for both Anthropic and OpenAI. That’s a concentration that has remained in place even as more companies begin paying for generative AI, Ramp lead economist Ara Kharazian said on X.

“This is a level of concentration risk unseen in any other software category we track,” Kharazian wrote on LinkedIn.

“At Anthropic, that concentration has a name attached to it,” PYMNTS wrote. “Coding tools Cursor and GitHub Copilot alone drove roughly $1.2 billion of the company’s $5 billion revenue milestone last year, close to a quarter of total revenue from just two customers.”