The big ship of AI is swaying.

Author Tao Huidong

Editor Wang Qingwu

Handcrafted Amount丨95%   AI Content丨5%

Anthropic's highly anticipated IPO, which is expected to make history, has seen increasing "unexpected" events.

The latest surprise is that on November 9, just one day before the scheduled start of the investor roadshow, Anthropic withdrew its IPO pricing document. This document initially set the highest market value for its pricing range at $1.441 trillion. Subsequently, Anthropic updated the document, determining the pricing range to be $70 to $78 per share, which means the highest market value was further adjusted down to $1.404 trillion, while the minimum market value was only $1.26 trillion.

The fierce pricing game surrounding the Anthropic IPO has evolved into a convoluted drama. It dropped from an initial rumored $2 trillion to the current $1.4 trillion in less than half a month.

Meanwhile, in a corner of the internet—on prediction markets—intense bullish and bearish battles have erupted over Anthropic's post-IPO market value performance, currently favoring the bears significantly. Theoretically, betting against Anthropic could net more than a tenfold return within a week.

More and more people are betting against Anthropic

In the past month and a half, a frenzy around Anthropic's IPO has sparked on public betting platforms. On the world's largest prediction market, Polymarket, there have been more than a dozen prediction markets related to Anthropic's IPO since October, with total betting amounts exceeding $37 million. This does not include several other mainstream betting platforms like Kalshi and trade.xyz.

The so-called "prediction market" is a concept that has gained popularity in the cryptocurrency sphere this year. Simply put, it allows users to trade predictions on real-world events: buying "yes" indicates betting that something will happen, while the opposite is betting that it will not. Each prediction's price ranges from $0 to $1, directly representing the market's perceived probability of the event occurring. Unlike general betting platforms, there is no bookmaker here, only bets between users.

Polymarket is a leading player in the prediction market, with its average daily trading volume quadrupling year-on-year in the first half of this year. After securing Series F funding at the end of October, the company's valuation reached $21 billion. Due to Polymarket's large user base and the use of real money for betting, its prediction results are often regarded as a bellwether on social media, especially regarding predictions for the U.S. elections and sports events like the World Cup.

Finance is not traditionally a hot area on Polymarket, yet more people are starting to "trade stocks" there this year. Polymarket last drew attention in the secondary market during the century's IPO of SpaceX earlier this year. The debates over SpaceX's valuation at that time were as intense as they are now for Anthropic. From early April to early May, the implied probability on Polymarket of SpaceX's "first-day closing market value exceeding $2 trillion" rose from 45% to 62%. Ultimately, SpaceX's first-day closing market value indeed exceeded $2 trillion. Since then, many media outlets and analysts have started to view betting outcomes on prediction platforms as a reference for pricing discovery before significant IPOs.

The attention surrounding Anthropic's IPO surpasses that of SpaceX. A wealth manager quoted by Reuters said, "People's interest in participating in the Anthropic IPO prediction is akin to queuing up to grab the latest iPhone." Among the various predictions (listing date, fundraising amount, etc.), retail investors are most enthusiastic about the traditional "first-day closing market value" project.

However, Anthropic's recent performance in this project is quite concerning, with predicted market value rapidly shrinking. Let's take a look at the odds. As of November 10, the odds for betting on Anthropic's first-day closing market value being under $1.25 trillion on Polymarket have dropped to 2.8 times. Just a week ago, these odds were as high as 42 times. Meanwhile, the odds for betting on Anthropic's market value being between $1.75–2.0 trillion have increased from 2.5 times at the end of October to the current 5.6 times.

To simplify, a week ago, the betting market estimated the possibility of Anthropic's first-day closing market value being under $1.25 trillion at about 2.4%, now it has risen to about 36%.

This is not simply a poll; each person making a choice has bet real money. Additionally, "prediction shares" on Polymarket are tradable in real-time. This means that if one bought the prediction for "first-day market value below $1.25 trillion" a week ago and sold it today, they could theoretically achieve about 15 times return.

Although it hasn't gone public yet, Anthropic's stock price on Polymarket has indeed collapsed. If Anthropic's first-day market value really is below $1.25 trillion, it would mean that even at the lower end of the range, it would break the issue price. This is a stark contrast to the fervent state of SpaceX's IPO betting on Polymarket in May.

Why did Anthropic withdraw its offer?

As the prediction market dramatically shifted towards bearishness, the seemingly erroneous withdrawal of the issuance document added more shadow to Anthropic's IPO journey.

Reuters reported that Anthropic sent a document to investment banks on the evening of November 9th, U.S. time, indicating a stock issuance plan of about 867 million shares, with a price range of $70 to $80 per share, calculating a fundraising amount of about $69.3 billion at the upper limit. However, less than two hours later, Anthropic sent another email stating that the previously provided pricing information was inaccurate and that it would update the document later.

Subsequently, Anthropic updated the document, reducing both the pricing range and fundraising amount, ultimately confirming the issuance of 825 million Class A shares, with a pricing range of $70 to $78 per share, and the fundraising amount reduced to between $57.75 billion and $64.35 billion.

One conspiracy theory suggests that perhaps Anthropic wanted to test the market response before deciding whether to adjust the terms, but received poor feedback from investors, leading to the retraction for a redesign of the issuance structure. Of course, it is also possible this is an over-interpretation; it could simply be a communication error within the company, such as sending the wrong version of the document.

Before October, when Anthropic's prospectus had not yet been released, the expected market value was $2 trillion. In just over the past ten days, this number has sharply shrunk. By early November, media reported that $1.5 trillion was seen as the upper limit of Anthropic's pricing range.

Following that was the stock market crash on November 5, with the Nasdaq Composite Index falling 5.56% in a single day, erasing about $2.5 trillion in market value, the largest single-day market value drop in its history. Tech stocks, chip stocks, and AI-related companies were nearly wiped out. On that day, the Wall Street Journal reported: "Some IPO investors are skeptical about whether Anthropic can achieve a valuation of $1.5 trillion." There were rumors that Anthropic might decide to postpone the issuance.

Currently, it seems Anthropic is very "receptive to advice," choosing to significantly lower the issue price to continue pushing for the IPO, rather than "waiting for a more favorable market environment."

The big ship of AI is swaying

The intensity of the pricing battle surrounding Anthropic's IPO has clearly evolved into a showdown between the bullish and bearish attitudes of the capital market towards AI. The same prospectus has led one faction of analysts to believe it is "beyond expectations," even "injecting new vitality into the struggling AI industry," while another faction focuses on the Q3 slowdown, believing the grand narrative of AI has "peaked."

As the most outstanding student in the village, Anthropic bears an immense burden.

For VCs in the primary market, Anthropic's IPO is of great significance. Its unprecedented massive financing demand compared to OpenAI has forced many established VCs to make “decisions against their principles,” enlarging their fund sizes to get involved. After 2025, many controversial SPVs have even been issued to invest specifically in these two giants.

The current issue is that Silicon Valley VCs hold a large amount of paper profits, yet over the past decade they've returned little in cash to LPs, making it difficult to increase capital for future larger funds. If Anthropic successfully goes public, a vast amount of cash worth hundreds of billions of dollars would flow back into Silicon Valley's VC ecosystem, alleviating all these issues.

For the entire AI industry, Anthropic's IPO is more than just a ripple effect; it can initiate sweeping changes. On one hand, its stock price will directly become a valuation anchor for other AI companies. On the other hand, Anthropic holds a staggering $895.4 billion in future commitments for computing power and infrastructure expenditure, of which $447.5 billion is set to expire by 2030. If Anthropic's performance falls short of expectations or cash flow is weaker than anticipated, a revaluation of the entire AI infrastructure will become necessary.

Anthropic's products remain excellent. While various unexpected scenarios unfold with the IPO, on November 9, Anthropic released its next-generation flagship model Fable 5.2, alongside launching Mythos 5.2, based on the same underlying model. The performance of Fable 5.2 continues to lead globally, and while its power has increased, it has significantly reduced in price, even cheaper than OpenAI’s secondary model Sol 6.

However, unlike the first half of the year, it has become increasingly difficult for the capital market to justify paying solely for "a stronger model" at this moment.

Notably, on November 10, SoftBank released its latest quarterly report (July-September). The two eye-catching pieces of information in the report are: one is a net loss of 1.12 trillion yen for the quarter; the other is that it was indeed called out by Musk for defaulting on a batch of power generation equipment purchase orders, which were originally intended for a data center in Ohio, a part of the "Stargate" project jointly developed by OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank.

From Anthropic to SoftBank, it may be an exaggeration to say that the bubble has burst, but the big ship of AI is undoubtedly swaying.

Original from Zhitongcaijing

免责声明：本文章仅代表作者个人观点，不代表本平台的立场和观点。本文章仅供信息分享，不构成对任何人的任何投资建议。用户与作者之间的任何争议，与本平台无关。如网页中刊载的文章或图片涉及侵权，请提供相关的权利证明和身份证明发送邮件到[email protected]，本平台相关工作人员将会进行核查。