Anthropic has decided it would rather go public at the wrong price than wait for the right one.

The Claude developer is pressing ahead with its IPO despite this week's tech selloff, accepting a lower valuation to get the listing done before Thanksgiving, according to The Decoder. Anthropic wants to raise $80–100 billion at a $1.25–1.75 trillion valuation, per investors cited by the Financial Times — a range that tops its current $965 billion private valuation but falls well short of the $2 trillion the most optimistic investors were hoping for when October began.

The roadshow starts next week, The Information reported, with a listing targeted for the week of November 16. That schedule survived a week that gave Anthropic every excuse to delay: the Nasdaq 100 dropped 6.4 percent on Thursday, the Democrats' midterm wins accelerated the selloff on promises to slow data center construction, and Reuters reported that prospective investors were openly doubting whether a November listing was still possible. The Wall Street Journal separately reported that three major investors considered the $1.5 trillion figure out of reach, with one putting fair value closer to $1 trillion.

Anthropic's own numbers gave the skeptics ammunition. Its amended prospectus, filed November 2, showed third-quarter revenue of $17 billion — but growth halving to 47 percent and a swing back to a $567 million operating loss, driven by premium-priced short-term compute. The counterargument is the top line: annualized revenue now sits at about $81 billion, up from roughly $65 billion at the end of July.

This is the part that matters beyond Anthropic. OpenAI already took the same haircut — cutting its funding-round target from a $1.4 trillion valuation and raising only about $11 billion of the $30 billion it originally sought. Anthropic's roadshow is now the first live test of whether public markets will pay frontier-AI prices after the correction, or whether the whole sector's valuations were a private-market artifact. A $100 billion raise would still be the largest listing on record, and the company filed to list on the Nasdaq under the ticker ANT.

Watch the price range when the roadshow opens. If it holds near $1.5 trillion, the AI trade gets its reprieve. If it lands near $1 trillion, every other lab's private valuation — and every data center commitment built on it — gets repriced next.

— via The Decoder