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In a perspective piece, Matt Scherer, co-author of a report on AI financial risk, argues the SEC should block Anthropic's upcoming initial public offering. He points to the company's IPO registration statement, which discloses nearly $900 billion in spending commitments extending into the 2030s alongside unaudited 2026 financials showing revenue growth slowing sharply in the third quarter.
Institutional investors preparing to participate in Anthropic's planned initial public offering are pushing for a more conservative valuation of around $1.5 trillion, according to reports. The push comes as a recent selloff in technology stocks has made some prospective buyers wary of pricing the AI company at the higher valuations previously discussed.
Anthropic disclosed in its IPO filing that the retail value of Claude AI it uses internally surpassed its monthly employee compensation, excluding stock awards, as of April. That internal usage grew more than 250-fold between January and September, and by September more than 90% of new code added to Anthropic's software was written by Claude.
OpenAI's latest fundraising round brought in less than half of the $30 billion it had been seeking, according to the Wall Street Journal. The shortfall leaves the company valued at roughly $1.25 trillion, below its targeted $1.4 trillion and behind rival Anthropic, which recently filed for an IPO at a valuation of up to $2 trillion.
Anthropic filed an updated Form S-1 with the SEC disclosing $33.24 billion in revenue for the first nine months of 2025, a roughly 1,200% jump year-over-year, alongside a $104 billion net loss largely tied to changes in the fair value of convertible notes and derivative liabilities. The filing shows $17 billion in third-quarter revenue and a $23.29 billion net loss for that quarter, plus aggregate purchase and lease commitments of about $895.4 billion, mostly for compute and infrastructure.
OpenAI has reduced its fundraising target from a previously reported $30 billion to $20 billion, according to the Financial Times. The round is reportedly being led by UAE-based investors, with a possible retail offering for wealthy individuals to help reach the goal. The Wall Street Journal added that OpenAI has secured $11 billion so far, with some large investors reportedly showing a 'tepid' response.
US stocks swung from early-week gains to steep losses, with the Nasdaq falling 1.4% Thursday and nearly 3% Friday after weak tech earnings, ending the week down 2% and October down 5.3%. The S&P 500 dropped roughly 2% for the week while the Dow, buoyed by a shift into defensive stocks, lost under 1% weekly but gained 1.7% for the month. Chipmakers initially rallied on Anthropic's IPO filing and SK Hynix's record profit, but Intel's weak outlook sent its shares down more than 28% Friday, and Fed Chairman Kevin Warsh's hawkish comments on inflation added to investor unease.
Tom's Hardware's Premium subscription service published a weekly digest covering Anthropic's pre-IPO filings, Cadence's new LLM suite for EDA tools, Nvidia's AI supply chain moves, Vera CPUs in the cloud, and a TP-Link update. The issue also features CPU expert Jake Roach's early work on defining agentic AI CPU benchmarks, plus a new primer explaining AI terms like inference, quantization, context, and KV cache for locally-run models.
Blackstone, anchor investor in a $63 billion deal financing Anthropic's chip purchases, has told investors it now expects the AI company to receive a high speculative-grade ('junk') credit rating in the double-B range after its IPO, according to the Financial Times. This reverses Blackstone's earlier prediction that Anthropic would achieve investment-grade status before 2027. Both Anthropic and Blackstone declined to comment when contacted by TechCrunch.
Anthropic's S-1 filing disclosed $16.29 billion in first-half 2026 revenue against $2.38 billion in cost of revenue, implying an 85% gross margin, with CEO Dario Amodei and six co-founders each holding over 200 million shares. However, the filing showed revenue growth slowing sharply from about 144% quarter-over-quarter in Q2 to roughly 47% in Q3, and did not detail per-dollar computing costs or management's outlook on the slowdown.
Anthropic filed a 335-page S-1 prospectus on Monday ahead of its stock offering, including a founders' letter urging investors to see their purchase as more than transactional. The filing devotes 94 pages to risk factors, warning that AI models could behave unpredictably and cause catastrophic harm beyond what the insurance industry could cover, while also describing AI's potential to usher in an 'age of miracles.'
Fast Company's AI Decoded newsletter examines Anthropic's investor pitch, noting that the company is presenting strong revenue growth projections to potential retail investors. The analysis points out that these projections are paired with heavy infrastructure spending commitments and no clear timeline for profitability.