#Gate直通IPO第三期Anthropic More and more people are bearish on Anthropic
Anthropic’s highly anticipated IPO, expected to make history, keeps springing “surprises.”
The latest surprise came on November 9, the day before investor roadshows were originally scheduled to begin, when Anthropic withdrew its IPO pricing document. The document would have set the top of its valuation range at $1.441 trillion. Anthropic then updated the filing, setting the price range at $70 to $78 per share. This further lowered the maximum valuation to $1.404 trillion, while the bottom of the range was only $1.26 trillion.
The fierce pricing battle surrounding Anthropic’s IPO has turned into a drawn-out drama. It took less than half a month for the rumored valuation to fall from $2 trillion to today’s $1.4 trillion.
Meanwhile, in one corner of the internet—the prediction markets—a fierce battle between bulls and bears over Anthropic’s post-listing market performance is underway, and the bears are currently winning by a wide margin.
In theory, betting against Anthropic could yield a net return of more than 10 times your stake in just one week. More and more people have been betting against Anthropic. Over the past half month or so, the IPO has sparked a frenzy on public betting platforms.
On the world’s largest prediction market, Polymarket, more than a dozen prediction markets of various sizes related to the Antropic IPO have appeared since October, with total bets exceeding $37 million. That doesn’t include several other major betting platforms, such as Kalshi and tradexyz.
“Prediction markets” are a concept that has become very popular in crypto circles this year. Simply put, they let users trade on predictions about real-world events: buying “yes” means betting that something will happen, while buying “no” means betting it won’t. Each prediction share is priced between $0 and $1, directly representing the market’s estimate of the probability that the event will happen.
Unlike conventional sports betting platforms, there is no bookmaker here—just users betting against one another. Polymarket is a leading player in prediction markets. Its average daily trading volume grew fourfold year over year in the first half of this year, and after its Series F funding round in late October, the company was valued at $21 billion. Because Polymarket has a large user base and people wager real money, its predictions are often viewed on social platforms as a kind of barometer, especially for U.S. elections and sporting events such as the World Cup. Finance has not traditionally been a popular category on Polymarket, but this year more and more people have started “trading stocks” there.
The last time Polymarket drew attention in secondary markets was during SpaceX’s historic IPO in the first half of this year. The debate over SpaceX’s valuation was no less heated than the one around Antropic now. From early April to early May this year, the implied probability on Polymarket that SpaceX’s market cap would exceed $2 trillion at the close of its first day rose from 45% to 62%. In the end, SpaceX’s first-day closing market cap did indeed top $2 trillion. Since then, many media outlets and analysts have begun treating betting results on prediction platforms as one reference point for price discovery ahead of major IPOs.
This time, the attention on Anthropic’s IPO is even greater than it was for SpaceX. Reuters quoted a wealth manager as saying: “People are as eager to participate in predictions about Anthropic’s IPO as they are to queue up for the latest iPhone.” Among the various predictions—such as listing date and fundraising amount—retail investors are naturally most enthusiastic about the traditional “first-day closing market cap” market. And Anthropic’s performance in this market over the past few days has been quite worrying: its predicted valuation is shrinking rapidly.
Let’s look at the odds. As of November 10, the odds on Polymarket for betting that Anthropic’s first-day closing market cap will be below $1.25 trillion had fallen to 2.8x. Just one week earlier, they had been as high as 42x. Meanwhile, the odds for betting that Antropic’s market cap will be between $1.75 trillion and $2.0 trillion have risen from 2.5x in late October to 5.6x today.
Put simply, a week ago the betting market thought the probability of Anthropic’s first-day closing market cap being below $1.25 trillion was only about 2.4%; now it has risen to about 36%. This isn’t a simple poll: everyone making a choice has real money on the line. And “prediction shares” on Polymarket can be traded in real time. That means if you bought a prediction that its first-day market cap would be below $1.25 trillion a week ago and sold it today, you could theoretically make about 15 times your investment. Anthropic hasn’t even gone public yet, but its stock price on Polymarket has already taken a very real nosedive. If Anthropic’s first-day market cap is indeed below $1.25 trillion, it would mean the stock opened below its IPO price even at the bottom of the pricing range. That’s a world apart from the enthusiastic betting on SpaceX’s IPO on Polymarket in May.
Why did Anthropic withdraw its pricing filing?
As prediction markets swung sharply toward the bears, the seemingly botched withdrawal of the offering document cast another shadow over Anthropic’s IPO.
Reuters reported that Anthropic sent investment banks a document on the evening of November 9 U.S. time, showing plans to issue about 867 million shares at a price range of $70 to $80 per share, for proceeds of about $69.3 billion at the top of the range. But less than two hours later, Anthropic sent another email saying the pricing information it had provided earlier was inaccurate and that it would update the document shortly. Anthropic then updated the filing, lowering both the price range and the fundraising target. It ultimately settled on issuing a total of 825 million Class A shares at an estimated price range of $70 to $78 per share, with proceeds reduced to between $57.75 billion and $64.35 billion.
Taking the conspiracy-theory view, perhaps Anthropic wanted to test the market’s reaction before deciding whether to adjust the terms, but investor feedback was poor, so it withdrew the filing and redesigned the offering structure. Of course, this could also be an overinterpretation. The world really is a bit of a circus: this may simply have been an internal communication error, with the wrong version of the document sent out.
Before October, when Anthropic’s prospectus had yet to be published, its expected valuation was $2 trillion. Over the past 10-plus days, that figure has shrunk dramatically. In early November, media reports said that $1.5 trillion was seen as the top of Anthropic’s pricing range. Then came the November 5 market crash: the Nasdaq Composite fell 5.56% in a single day, wiping out about $2.5 trillion in Nasdaq market value and setting a record for its largest single-day market-cap decline. Tech stocks, chip stocks, and AI-related companies were almost completely wiped out. That day, The Wall Street Journal reported: “Some IPO investors are skeptical that Anthropic can achieve a $1.5 trillion valuation.” There were also rumors that Anthropic might decide to postpone the offering.
For now, Anthropic seems quite “willing to take advice,” choosing to sharply lower its offering price and press ahead with the IPO rather than “wait for more favorable market conditions.”
The AI ship is rocking
The fierce battle over Anthropic’s IPO pricing has plainly become a head-to-head clash between bullish and bearish views on AI in the capital markets.
Looking at the same prospectus, one camp says it “exceeded expectations” and even “reinvigorated the struggling AI industry”; the other focuses on the slowdown in Q3 growth and believes the grand AI narrative has already “peaked.”
As the village’s most outstanding student, Anthropic has a lot riding on it.
For VCs in the private markets, Anthropic’s IPO is hugely significant. Its unprecedentedly massive funding needs, along with OpenAI’s, have forced even many established VCs to make “decisions that go against their founding principles,” greatly expanding their fund sizes just to get in. Since 2025 began, they have also issued a large number of controversial SPVs specifically to invest in these two giants.
The problem now is that Silicon Valley VCs are sitting on huge paper gains, but over the past 10 years they have returned little cash to their LPs, making it difficult to raise more capital for even larger funds in the future.
If Anthropic successfully goes public, an enormous amount of capital—hundreds of billions of dollars—will flow back into Silicon Valley’s VC ecosystem, and this will no longer be a problem. Anthropic’s IPO could also have far-reaching effects across the entire AI industry. On the one hand, its stock price will directly become a valuation benchmark for other AI companies. On the other, Anthropic has commitments of up to $895.4 billion in future computing capacity and infrastructure spending on its books, of which $447.5 billion comes due before 2030. If Anthropic’s performance or cash flow falls short of expectations, the entire AI infrastructure sector will need to be revalued.
Anthropic’s products remain excellent. Even as its IPO drama unfolded, Anthropic released its next-generation flagship model, Fable 5.2, on November 9, along with Mythos 5.2, based on the same underlying model. Fable 5.2 continues to lead the world in performance, while also delivering a substantial price reduction despite its greater capabilities. It is even cheaper than OpenAI’s second-tier model, Sol 6. But unlike in the first half of the year, the capital markets now find it much harder to reward “more powerful models” on that basis alone.
It’s worth noting that SoftBank released its latest quarterly results (July–September) on November 10. Two details stood out: a net loss of ¥1.12 trillion for the quarter, and the fact that Musk turned out to be right—SoftBank really did default on a batch of power-generation equipment orders. The equipment was originally intended for a data center in Ohio, part of the “Stargate” project being developed by OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank.
From Anthropic to SoftBank, calling it the bursting of a bubble would be an exaggeration, but this AI ship is undoubtedly rocking.
Anthropic’s highly anticipated IPO, expected to make history, keeps springing “surprises.”
The latest surprise came on November 9, the day before investor roadshows were originally scheduled to begin, when Anthropic withdrew its IPO pricing document. The document would have set the top of its valuation range at $1.441 trillion. Anthropic then updated the filing, setting the price range at $70 to $78 per share. This further lowered the maximum valuation to $1.404 trillion, while the bottom of the range was only $1.26 trillion.
The fierce pricing battle surrounding Anthropic’s IPO has turned into a drawn-out drama. It took less than half a month for the rumored valuation to fall from $2 trillion to today’s $1.4 trillion.
Meanwhile, in one corner of the internet—the prediction markets—a fierce battle between bulls and bears over Anthropic’s post-listing market performance is underway, and the bears are currently winning by a wide margin.
In theory, betting against Anthropic could yield a net return of more than 10 times your stake in just one week. More and more people have been betting against Anthropic. Over the past half month or so, the IPO has sparked a frenzy on public betting platforms.
On the world’s largest prediction market, Polymarket, more than a dozen prediction markets of various sizes related to the Antropic IPO have appeared since October, with total bets exceeding $37 million. That doesn’t include several other major betting platforms, such as Kalshi and tradexyz.
“Prediction markets” are a concept that has become very popular in crypto circles this year. Simply put, they let users trade on predictions about real-world events: buying “yes” means betting that something will happen, while buying “no” means betting it won’t. Each prediction share is priced between $0 and $1, directly representing the market’s estimate of the probability that the event will happen.
Unlike conventional sports betting platforms, there is no bookmaker here—just users betting against one another. Polymarket is a leading player in prediction markets. Its average daily trading volume grew fourfold year over year in the first half of this year, and after its Series F funding round in late October, the company was valued at $21 billion. Because Polymarket has a large user base and people wager real money, its predictions are often viewed on social platforms as a kind of barometer, especially for U.S. elections and sporting events such as the World Cup. Finance has not traditionally been a popular category on Polymarket, but this year more and more people have started “trading stocks” there.
The last time Polymarket drew attention in secondary markets was during SpaceX’s historic IPO in the first half of this year. The debate over SpaceX’s valuation was no less heated than the one around Antropic now. From early April to early May this year, the implied probability on Polymarket that SpaceX’s market cap would exceed $2 trillion at the close of its first day rose from 45% to 62%. In the end, SpaceX’s first-day closing market cap did indeed top $2 trillion. Since then, many media outlets and analysts have begun treating betting results on prediction platforms as one reference point for price discovery ahead of major IPOs.
This time, the attention on Anthropic’s IPO is even greater than it was for SpaceX. Reuters quoted a wealth manager as saying: “People are as eager to participate in predictions about Anthropic’s IPO as they are to queue up for the latest iPhone.” Among the various predictions—such as listing date and fundraising amount—retail investors are naturally most enthusiastic about the traditional “first-day closing market cap” market. And Anthropic’s performance in this market over the past few days has been quite worrying: its predicted valuation is shrinking rapidly.
Let’s look at the odds. As of November 10, the odds on Polymarket for betting that Anthropic’s first-day closing market cap will be below $1.25 trillion had fallen to 2.8x. Just one week earlier, they had been as high as 42x. Meanwhile, the odds for betting that Antropic’s market cap will be between $1.75 trillion and $2.0 trillion have risen from 2.5x in late October to 5.6x today.
Put simply, a week ago the betting market thought the probability of Anthropic’s first-day closing market cap being below $1.25 trillion was only about 2.4%; now it has risen to about 36%. This isn’t a simple poll: everyone making a choice has real money on the line. And “prediction shares” on Polymarket can be traded in real time. That means if you bought a prediction that its first-day market cap would be below $1.25 trillion a week ago and sold it today, you could theoretically make about 15 times your investment. Anthropic hasn’t even gone public yet, but its stock price on Polymarket has already taken a very real nosedive. If Anthropic’s first-day market cap is indeed below $1.25 trillion, it would mean the stock opened below its IPO price even at the bottom of the pricing range. That’s a world apart from the enthusiastic betting on SpaceX’s IPO on Polymarket in May.
Why did Anthropic withdraw its pricing filing?
As prediction markets swung sharply toward the bears, the seemingly botched withdrawal of the offering document cast another shadow over Anthropic’s IPO.
Reuters reported that Anthropic sent investment banks a document on the evening of November 9 U.S. time, showing plans to issue about 867 million shares at a price range of $70 to $80 per share, for proceeds of about $69.3 billion at the top of the range. But less than two hours later, Anthropic sent another email saying the pricing information it had provided earlier was inaccurate and that it would update the document shortly. Anthropic then updated the filing, lowering both the price range and the fundraising target. It ultimately settled on issuing a total of 825 million Class A shares at an estimated price range of $70 to $78 per share, with proceeds reduced to between $57.75 billion and $64.35 billion.
Taking the conspiracy-theory view, perhaps Anthropic wanted to test the market’s reaction before deciding whether to adjust the terms, but investor feedback was poor, so it withdrew the filing and redesigned the offering structure. Of course, this could also be an overinterpretation. The world really is a bit of a circus: this may simply have been an internal communication error, with the wrong version of the document sent out.
Before October, when Anthropic’s prospectus had yet to be published, its expected valuation was $2 trillion. Over the past 10-plus days, that figure has shrunk dramatically. In early November, media reports said that $1.5 trillion was seen as the top of Anthropic’s pricing range. Then came the November 5 market crash: the Nasdaq Composite fell 5.56% in a single day, wiping out about $2.5 trillion in Nasdaq market value and setting a record for its largest single-day market-cap decline. Tech stocks, chip stocks, and AI-related companies were almost completely wiped out. That day, The Wall Street Journal reported: “Some IPO investors are skeptical that Anthropic can achieve a $1.5 trillion valuation.” There were also rumors that Anthropic might decide to postpone the offering.
For now, Anthropic seems quite “willing to take advice,” choosing to sharply lower its offering price and press ahead with the IPO rather than “wait for more favorable market conditions.”
The AI ship is rocking
The fierce battle over Anthropic’s IPO pricing has plainly become a head-to-head clash between bullish and bearish views on AI in the capital markets.
Looking at the same prospectus, one camp says it “exceeded expectations” and even “reinvigorated the struggling AI industry”; the other focuses on the slowdown in Q3 growth and believes the grand AI narrative has already “peaked.”
As the village’s most outstanding student, Anthropic has a lot riding on it.
For VCs in the private markets, Anthropic’s IPO is hugely significant. Its unprecedentedly massive funding needs, along with OpenAI’s, have forced even many established VCs to make “decisions that go against their founding principles,” greatly expanding their fund sizes just to get in. Since 2025 began, they have also issued a large number of controversial SPVs specifically to invest in these two giants.
The problem now is that Silicon Valley VCs are sitting on huge paper gains, but over the past 10 years they have returned little cash to their LPs, making it difficult to raise more capital for even larger funds in the future.
If Anthropic successfully goes public, an enormous amount of capital—hundreds of billions of dollars—will flow back into Silicon Valley’s VC ecosystem, and this will no longer be a problem. Anthropic’s IPO could also have far-reaching effects across the entire AI industry. On the one hand, its stock price will directly become a valuation benchmark for other AI companies. On the other, Anthropic has commitments of up to $895.4 billion in future computing capacity and infrastructure spending on its books, of which $447.5 billion comes due before 2030. If Anthropic’s performance or cash flow falls short of expectations, the entire AI infrastructure sector will need to be revalued.
Anthropic’s products remain excellent. Even as its IPO drama unfolded, Anthropic released its next-generation flagship model, Fable 5.2, on November 9, along with Mythos 5.2, based on the same underlying model. Fable 5.2 continues to lead the world in performance, while also delivering a substantial price reduction despite its greater capabilities. It is even cheaper than OpenAI’s second-tier model, Sol 6. But unlike in the first half of the year, the capital markets now find it much harder to reward “more powerful models” on that basis alone.
It’s worth noting that SoftBank released its latest quarterly results (July–September) on November 10. Two details stood out: a net loss of ¥1.12 trillion for the quarter, and the fact that Musk turned out to be right—SoftBank really did default on a batch of power-generation equipment orders. The equipment was originally intended for a data center in Ohio, part of the “Stargate” project being developed by OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank.
From Anthropic to SoftBank, calling it the bursting of a bubble would be an exaggeration, but this AI ship is undoubtedly rocking.
