Is Anthropic's IPO a Referendum on the AI Market?

Dan Primack says the Anthropic IPO will be a referendum on the AI market, or on the business of AI, though that reading is not necessarily fair. A price a little below or above that trillion is not a big deal in the big picture.

Primack's view is that the economy holds up, while circularity in the contracts is still the issue. Anthropic's contracts with SpaceX, Broadcom, and the other companies leave them incredibly connected. The filing matched leaked financials already in circulation. Revenue is going through the roof, and so is spend. The Q3 numbers were not in the document. Primack's guess is that, before Anthropic goes public, they show up in an amended filing. Alex Kantrowitz puts the working assumption at a hundred billion dollars raised and a 2 trillion valuation. Primack says the ability to get there is not based on the document. Anthropic can get that raise because that is what it wants, and the market will give it whatever it wants, just as the market was willing to give SpaceX $40-something billion to buy GPUs.

Big investors are tied to the industry and the story, and the shares are expected to end up in the indexes. On the same day, SpaceX secured $40 billion in debt financing to buy GPUs, and Meta said it will seek up to $95 billion in equity financing for its AI build-out. That demand is a capacity test for Wall Street, and the money for the offering is there.