Anthropic investors betting on a $2tn valuation in a record IPO are betting on a market that’s already jittery, affirms the CEO of one of the world’s largest independent financial advisory organisations.
Nigel Green of deVere Group’s comments come as reports suggest Anthropic is preparing to list as soon as October at a valuation north of $2tn, with some backers modelling a figure closer to $3tn, which would make it the largest stock market debut ever recorded.
The plan rests on annualised revenue nearly tripling by the end of 2026, at a moment when Wall Street’s patience for lofty AI multiples is visibly thinning and Nvidia, the sector’s bellwether, heads into a pivotal earnings week under real pressure.
He says: “Anthropic wants to go public at a price that assumes its growth rate barely slows for another year, and it’s a bold assumption to hang a record-breaking IPO on, especially with October arriving at exactly the wrong moment to test it.”
He continues: “The number everyone is pricing off is an annualised run-rate, not audited revenue, a projection stretched forward from a few strong months rather than a certified year of sales.
“We saw in June how fast that projection can move, when a temporary Commerce Department restriction on Anthropic’s top models slowed growth almost overnight.
“A single policy call did that. Picture what the next one could do.
“Investors keep skipping past the part that matters most: a valuation this size prices in years of near-uninterrupted acceleration, not one good quarter, with no room for a repeat of June and no room for the regulatory and geopolitical friction still clearly in play.”
He adds: “Look at what’s happening around Anthropic this very week. CoreWeave, one of the AI infrastructure names most tightly bound to Nvidia, has admitted it would struggle badly if forced to shift away from Nvidia’s chips. Far from a footnote, it’s a signal of how tightly wound and circular the financing behind this entire boom has become, right as Nvidia walks into earnings shadowed by China licensing uncertainty and mounting questions over who is really funding whom across the AI supply chain.
“Then look at the public comparisons investors are actually using to justify Anthropic’s number.
“Palantir and Nebius are trading at somewhere between forty and fifty-five times revenue, and both are already drawing serious short-seller fire even as their share prices climb.
“If the market is this uneasy about paying up for AI names that already report audited, public numbers, it should give serious pause to anyone pricing a private AI lab off a forward-looking metric instead.”
He warns: “SpaceX is the clearest lesson in what happens when private valuations move faster than reality can confirm them. It went from roughly three hundred and fifty billion dollars to eight hundred billion in about a year, and there’s already talk of it approaching two trillion before it has even listed.
“Momentum in a private market is not the same thing as durability in a public one, and Anthropic is walking the same path, only faster, straight into an IPO window where investors are already nervous.
“None of this means Anthropic isn’t a genuinely exceptional business, because it plainly is.
“But exceptional and correctly priced are two different questions, and right now the gap between them is wide. Pricing the largest IPO in history off unaudited, extrapolated numbers, in a market already flinching at AI multiples, is the central risk in this whole story, not a footnote to it.”
He concludes: “Investors weighing exposure to this listing, directly or through the AI trade more broadly, need to separate genuine long-term conviction from October momentum.
“Those are not the same trade, and treating them as one is how sharp corrections get made.
“Moments like this are precisely where independent, professional guidance earns its keep, because the difference between participating intelligently and getting caught out comes down to timing and discipline, not enthusiasm.”
