Instant View: Anthropic IPO filing ratifies Wall Street's AI obsession

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NEW YORK, June 1 : AI giant Anthropic said on Monday it has confidentially filed for a U.S. initial public offering, teeing up a watershed moment for Wall Street's AI frenzy.

Tech stocks continue to lead the Nasdaq Composite and S&P 500 in a record-breaking market rally, while Elon Musk's SpaceX is set to price its IPO this month and Anthropic rival OpenAI, led by Sam Altman, is waiting on deck.

MARKET REACTION:

U.S. stocks were mixed on Monday afternoon, with the Nasdaq up 0.3 per cent, the S&P 500 up 0.1 per cent and the Dow industrials off 0.3 per cent. Salesforce rose 10 per cent on Monday, following a report that its stake in Anthropic is valued at $5 billion.

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COMMENTS: MATT KENNEDY, SENIOR STRATEGIST AT RENAISSANCE CAPITAL, NEW YORK:"It's true that many private tech unicorns have sat on the sidelines waiting for an IPO market that would grant them their desired valuations. That is not the case with Anthropic and other "elite" AI developers."

"Virtually any private round Anthropic raised would have met equal or greater enthusiasm in public markets. There is insatiable demand for these companies among public investors. It's really more the holdovers from the 2021 cycle that are having a harder time hitting their private valuations." HARRISON ROLFES, SENIOR LATE-STAGE COMPANY RESEARCH ANALYST AT PITCHBOOK, CALIFORNIA:

"Anthropic filing a confidential S-1 today starts the clock on what will be the most scrutinized public offering in tech history, and the number that determines everything is not the $965B valuation or the $47B revenue run rate. It is gross margin, which no one outside Anthropic has ever seen, and which will either validate or collapse the entire narrative the private markets have been pricing for three years." NATE ELLIOTT, AI ANALYST AT EMARKETER, NEW YORK:

"We're about to find out whether the market thinks AI is a consumer story or an enterprise story. Because while Claude has built a solid enterprise user base, it's just not competitive as a consumer AI platform. Emarketer forecasts that only 5.4 per cent of US internet users will use Claude in 2026, far behind the 36.6 per cent who will use ChatGPT and the 27.4 per cent who will use Gemini. The good news for Anthropic: more than 60 per cent of US AI users say they use these tools for work, and we believe that percentage will only grow."

BRIAN MULBERRY, CHIEF MARKET STRATEGIST AT ZACKS INVESTMENT MANAGEMENT, COLORADO:

"So the question we want to see answered more clearly is when would Anthropic be reliably cash flow positive leading to real EPS growth? There is no doubt that the demand for Claude product at the Enterprise level is huge as agentic capabilities grow, and also there are key strategic partnerships that help provide capital and infrastructure as a way of feeding the growth are all positives for the IPO but for establishing a valuation lacking some of the important details becomes difficult."

JAMIE COX, MANAGING PARTNER, HARRIS FINANCIAL GROUP, RICHMOND, VIRGINIA: "This is the part of the cycle where Wall Street gets to see what’s really going on with these companies.  If the 1990s template holds, we are set to see the entire tech sector get a boost once the earnings picture on AI becomes less opaque."  

DAN IVES, GLOBAL HEAD OF TECH RESEARCH, WEDBUSH SECURITIES, NEW YORK: 

"This represents a major step for Anthropic to get ahead of OpenAI as Altman & Co. get ready to go through their own confidential filing. This comes at a much-needed time as SpaceX, which filed its S-1 on May 20th, is set to go on its roadshow later this week pointing to the all-out race to get the much-desired liquidity from public markets with SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI all looking to go public in 2026.

"We believe this represents an opening of the floodgates for the IPO market, which has been relatively dormant for a few years, with these three major conglomerates set to go public later this year, but this has turned into a race to reach public markets over the coming months. Investors will be eagerly awaiting more details from Anthropic's S-1 over the coming weeks."

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