Rumors Debunked: Anthropic's IPO Has Not Been Withdrawn, But The Shrinking Trillion-Dollar AI Bubble Has Spooked Wall Street
The largest IPO in tech history, is the bubble about to burst?
Just yesterday, a post on X caused a huge stir.
A top influencer posted a line:
Anthropic IPO is cancelled!
At present, this news has been refuted, and the prospectus of Anthropic is still posted on the official website of SEC:
The SEC's public archive shows that Anthropic has a total of 8 documents: the confidential draft on June 1, 5 revised drafts from July to October, the public S-1 on October 26, and the updated S-1/A on November 2.
Anthropic even quietly launched a mysterious subdomain containing IPO related content.
However, all signs indicate that the capital market is running out of patience.
The AI bubble has made Wall Street nervous.
Did a big shot step in to "debunk" the rumor?
The timing of this news breaking is very delicate.
Just a few days ago, Anthropic had just submitted its S-1 registration statement to the US SEC.
On November 2, they also submitted a revised version, gearing up to list on the NASDAQ.
According to the plan, the global roadshow will start in the week of November 9, and countless eyes are waiting for it.
As a result, the news that the IPO was cancelled once spread widely.
Although the rumor was refuted quickly, everyone understands that Anthropic's IPO is in trouble.
What is more terrifying than rumors is that insiders have started to vote with their feet one after another.
On the eve of the bell ringing, the key contributors have left the company?
In the past two weeks, a major personnel earthquake has occurred at Anthropic!
The bell is about to ring, and financial freedom is just around the corner, but the core team has left?
Now, three core figures of the Claude Code team have left one after another.
On October 23, Anthony Morris — the veteran who created the desktop version of Claude Code left the company.
On October 24, Thariq Shihipar, known as "Tibo" at Anthropic, resigned.
On October 30, Cat Wu, the top leader of Claude Code and Cowork, also left.
It was she and Boris Cherny who once co-led the whole process of turning CC from an internal project into the core of the company.
Netizens asked: Are you going on vacation? She replied: After AGI is realized.
These three people are extremely important.
The IPO prospectus clearly states that products like Claude Code are of decisive significance to the company's commercialization.
Anthropic's profit-generating machine relies on the enterprise customers of CC.
As a result, the three key contributors actually left at the critical moment of the IPO?
Moreover, the time point when they left is exactly between the submission of S-1 and the roadshow.
This is a heavy blow to Wall Street investors who are ready to invest money.
Turning from profit to loss, the hundred-billion-dollar computing power bill scares off Wall Street
Of course, there is another reason that forces Wall Street to back off — the shocking financial data in the prospectus.
Once upon a time, Anthropic's valuation in the private placement market was once speculated to an astonishing $2 trillion!
But what about now?
According to Bloomberg, the investment banks arranging the IPO were forced to disclose: The reasonable valuation range must be significantly reduced to $1.4 trillion to $1.5 trillion!
After this change, $500 billion of valuation has evaporated.
Why? You will understand after looking at the prospectus they updated on November 2.
First of all, the growth myth has been shattered.
Anthropic's revenue in the third quarter of this year was $169.6 billion. Sounds high, right? But wait, look at the growth rate — the revenue of the first 9 months increased by 1206% year-on-year, while the quarter-on-quarter growth of a single quarter was only 47%.
It should be noted that their quarter-on-quarter growth rate in the second quarter was as high as 144%!
In order to seize the market, Anthropic had to offer price cuts and discounts of about $600 million in Q3.
Moreover, even if this $600 million is added back, the growth rate is only around 52%, which is far from the momentum of the past.
Secondly, the profit has turned from positive to negative.
If the slowdown in growth can be explained by "the base has become larger", then the depletion of the profit pool is a fatal injury.
In the second quarter, Anthropic still delivered a positive profit of $974 million; but in the third quarter, the GAAP operating loss reached $567 million.
But this is not the most terrifying part.
What really suffocates Wall Street is the huge "computing power debt" that Anthropic carries.
The prospectus reveals that the company's total current procurement and lease commitments are as high as $8954 billion!
The vast majority of this is the computing power infrastructure expenditure committed to cloud vendors and chip giants.
Among them, $4475 billion has to be paid before the end of 2030, and in just the next 12 months, $698 billion of bills will mature!
In total, this is a hard expenditure commitment of nearly $9 trillion!
This unsustainable loss has made even the most daring investors start to panic.
As the breaking news blogger "Strawberry Guy" said:
Anthropic's IPO is in deep trouble, and given its revenue scale, losses of this level are completely unsustainable.
Blackstone: Credit rating is "junk grade"
Previously, Blackstone, the top PE giant on Wall Street, issued a warning that was extremely destructive.
In the letter, Blackstone Group warned —
Don't hold illusions. Anthropic will most likely be rated as "junk grade" in credit rating after its IPO.
This means that in the eyes of the capital market, the risk level of Anthropic's business model of "burning money to train large models" is exactly the same as that of marginal enterprises that may default at any time.
Once labeled as "junk grade", Anthropic will have to pay much higher interest if it wants to borrow money in the secondary market.
In this case, what can it use to pay the astronomical figure of 9 trillion dollars?
Talk about AI faith with Wall Street? Sorry, they only recognize cash.
Moreover, this is not just the crisis of Anthropic alone.
All companies in this track! When can you convert GPU into net profit?
Even the big brother OpenAI can't raise money anymore?
The chill has spread to everyone.
It is reported that OpenAI's new round of financing has also suffered a major setback.
Originally, OpenAI's planned target financing scale was $300 billion, with a valuation sprinting to $1.4 trillion.
However, their target scale was forced to be reduced to $200 billion, and the valuation also shrank to $1.25 trillion.
What is more embarrassing is that on the investor subscription deadline of October 30, OpenAI only received about $110 billion in subscription commitments.
At the final critical moment, a large number of investors significantly reduced their