The US stock market crashed overnight, Anthropic's valuation has plummeted to 500 billion, and engaging in ASI development may face a 20-year prison sentence.
When people woke up this morning, Moments and group chats of countless users were flooded with posts about "plunge" and "crash".
Everyone was spreading the news: Last night, the US stock market suffered an epic bloodbath.
In just 40 minutes, the market value of the S&P 500 evaporated by 2.5 trillion US dollars in an instant!
This is one of the fastest and most brutal moments of wealth shrinkage in the history of the US stock market.
Moreover, the Anthropic IPO is also hanging in the balance!
Now, Anthropic's IPO valuation has dropped from 2 trillion US dollars to 1.5 trillion US dollars, and it may even be further cut to 1 trillion US dollars, with rumors even mentioning a figure as low as 500 billion US dollars!
It is almost a brutal "ankle cut" valuation collapse.
Worse still, US tech stocks evaporated by 2.5 trillion US dollars overnight, and it is now a question whether Anthropic can successfully go public at all.
Epic Crash: US Stock Market Plunges Across the Board, the Magnificent Seven Tech Giants Suffer a Bloodbath
Wall Street last night can only be described as "brutal".
The three major US stock indexes plummeted across the board ——
The Nasdaq nosedived by more than 1400 points, with a decline of 5.52%.
The S&P 500 lost 2.9 trillion US dollars in a single day.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged 1833.06 points, down as much as 3.44%.
The tech stock sell-off was like a bursting flood, and the total market value of the "Magnificent Seven Tech Giants" evaporated by more than 1 trillion US dollars!
When it comes to individual stocks, the once highly favored market darlings have all fallen from their pedestals.
This morning, the storm crossed the Pacific directly: South Korea's KOSPI dived by nearly 9% at opening, triggering a circuit breaker immediately and suspending all trading across the market.
The screen was flooded with red declines, and all assets were falling together.
Just the day before yesterday, the US stock market was celebrating the landing of the midterm election result, with the Dow surging 1500 points; only 24 hours later, the Dow reversed and plunged 1833 points in a single day, erasing all gains instantly, which is extremely dramatic.
NVIDIA plummeted 9.26%, evaporating more than 440 billion US dollars in a single day, and its year-to-date gains were almost wiped out;
AMD dived 15%, Micron plunged 17%, Western Digital fell 22%;
Qualcomm dropped by nearly 9.5%.
The high cost of storage chips is seriously eroding profits.
The two leading computing power rental companies suffered a brutal bloodbath: CoreWeave dived 10%, having retreated 76% from its peak last year; Nebius plunged 15%, down 58% from its high this year. Even energy stocks in charge of power supply, including GE Vernova and Constellation Energy, were also hit by fierce sell-offs.
Elon Musk's Tesla plummeted by nearly 11%, SpaceX fell by more than 9%, and concerns about blocked expansion of AI training centers spread rapidly.
AI concept stocks were targeted and crashed one by one!
The direct trigger was the result of the US midterm election — the Democratic Party took control of both the House and the Senate. What Wall Street fears most is that the AI infrastructure industry will be "strangled".
It should be noted that over the past year and more, the US stock market has repeatedly hit new highs by betting heavily on the "AI computing power chain" and "data center construction".
Once this logic is broken, the entire industrial chain will be overturned!
Anthropic's Shocking Thunder: 895 Billion US Dollar Debt Black Hole, Valuation Collapses from 2 Trillion to Brutal "Ankle Cut"
Originally, Anthropic was held in extremely high regard by Wall Street, and was regarded as the ballast stone of global tech stocks in 2026.
A few days ago, the market's IPO valuation expectation for it was still shouting for 2 trillion US dollars.
However, the newly disclosed data directly shocked all major Wall Street investment banks:
Anthropic bears up to 895 billion US dollars in irrevocable computing power and infrastructure expenditure commitments!
What does this concept mean?
Among all US tech giants, apart from Alphabet, Google's parent company, which has 1.06 trillion US dollars in commitments, Anthropic's bill directly surpasses Meta's 866 billion US dollars, outmatching the whole Silicon Valley.
This means that even if the company earns no money at all tomorrow, it still has to pay this sky-high bill. Among these commitments:
Broadcom: 161 billion US dollars;
Google: 121 billion US dollars, plus a commitment of up to 150 billion US dollars for AI chip procurement;
SpaceX: 121 billion US dollars;
Amazon: At least 110 billion US dollars.
What is even more fatal is the repayment schedule.
In the next 12 months alone, Anthropic has to pay a full 700 billion US dollars in real cash; by the end of 2030, it has to spend 4.48 trillion US dollars.
Can it earn that much money?
Although its revenue in the third quarter surged by 47% to 17 billion US dollars, the bottomless pit of large model R&D and huge depreciation are expanding its net loss at an astronomical rate.
Annual revenue amounts to tens of billions of dollars, while liabilities are close to a trillion, and 700 billion dollars of bills are due in just one year.
As soon as the news came out, the capital market completely lost its temper.
Investment institutions collectively turned against it and launched a fierce pressure campaign.
The IPO that was imagined to have a 2 trillion US dollar market value just a few days ago saw its target valuation quickly halved to 1.5 trillion, then 1 trillion, and there are even rumors that some people offered an ultra-low "ankle cut" quotation of 500 billion US dollars in private transactions.
When Wall Street found out that even the top AI myth-making template was built on "writing IOUs worth trillions of dollars", everything collapsed.
Anthropic is Facing a Huge Crisis
Can AI models earn back all the money they burned?
According to data from the prediction market platform Kalshi, the possibility of Anthropic going public in 2026 has plummeted from nearly 90% before the midterm election to less than 60%.
A former Morgan Stanley employee and Silicon Valley partner said bluntly: Cutting the valuation is not a big deal at all, because this game may have already ended.
He pointed out that the entire existence of Anthropic (and similar AI giants) is built on a financing model of "extreme asset-liability mismatch".
This is essentially a "reflexivity trap of the confidence game".
In simple terms: AI companies need to continuously purchase computing power from ultra-large-scale data centers (such as Amazon and Google). To pay for these, they must continuously raise funds and issue new shares at extremely high valuations. This model can only be maintained when stock prices keep rising all the way.
However, once the IPO pricing goes wrong, or the stock market environment deteriorates, a death spiral will start.
Without high-valued equity, they cannot borrow money; without credit, they cannot pay the computing power bills; if they cannot pay the computing power bills, the company cannot survive, because those nearly one trillion dollars of irrevocable commitments are a fatal negative asset mortgage.
"If credit rating agencies won't give an investment-grade bond rating to a company with a 2 trillion US dollar market value, they will definitely not give a junk bond rating to a company worth 1 trillion US dollars."
In this case, Anthropic is facing an extremely severe life-and-death test if it wants to go public smoothly.
If it forces the roadshow, it may face the embarrassment of no one paying attention; if it delays, the 700 billion US dollar bill next year will soon be overdue.
Black Swan Event Brings the Entire AI Infrastructure Industry to a Halt
And the result of the US midterm election directly pulled the power switch for the global AI computing power industrial chain.
The Democratic Party not only took control of both the House and the Senate, but also won a surprise victory in the Texas governor election, the base of the AI computing power industry.
The newly elected governor clearly stated during the campaign: Implement a temporary ban on high-energy-consuming data centers, and cancel all tax breaks for data center operators.
