Anthropic has become the most closely watched company in the global IPO pipeline yet the process the market seems to know the least about.

While a handful of banks are fully inside the process, others are being told little about the company’s plans. This secrecy appears deliberate: once Anthropic holds its analyst day and brings more banks into its decision-making, details are likely to leak. Keeping the circle small allows the company to preserve flexibility over timing, valuation, and whether to proceed at all.

But the silence cannot continue for much longer if Anthropic wants to potentially complete its IPO before the US midterm elections on 3 November. The company would need to hold its analyst day during the week of 28 September and publish its S-1 by 5 October at the latest, according to an investor. Meanwhile, an ECM banker separately said that the filing could become public in roughly two weeks.

Both scenarios put Anthropic close to decision time. If it misses the early October filing window, completing the IPO before the midterms would become difficult. November offers little room between the election, the age of the company’s financial statements, and Thanksgiving, leaving early December or 2027 as the more realistic alternatives.

Anthropic and its banks may simply be trying to retain as much flexibility as possible. Publishing the S-1 would not force the company to launch, but it would allow it to move quickly if markets appear viable. At the same time, the company has also been notably quiet on the structure of any IPO.

“They have been unbelievably tight-lipped, especially compared to SpaceX, which I know had Elon so therefore was always going to be more public,” a second banker said. “But the silence from Anthropic is remarkable on key structural elements, like retail for example. We all understand there is going to be a retail element to the deal, but we have very little detail around it.”

The need for the secrecy may have increased following Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s latest comments about the possible dangers of AI. Skeptical buyside investors and market participants have questioned the contrast between Anthropic warning that advanced AI could pose a threat to humanity and the company preparing to ask public investors for money to accelerate its growth, as well as an attempt at raising barriers to entry for the entire ecosystem.

The investor described Amodei’s decision to enter that debate while Anthropic is preparing an IPO as unhelpful. It has given the company’s banks another reason to limit information until Anthropic can explain its position directly to the buyside, the investor said. Anthropic is already on file confidentially and is restricted in what it can say publicly. Once it launches the deal, management will have a chance to move the conversation back toward the business, its growth, and how it plans to make money.

That is one reason the company is largely expected to list this year, regardless of recent murmurs on a delay to the timetable. A public listing would give Anthropic access to a deep pool of capital, bolster its balance sheet, and provide listed shares that could eventually be used for acquisitions. A move into 2027, by contrast, would inevitably prompt questions over whether the delay reflected market conditions, disagreement over valuation, or concerns about the business itself.

Other IPO candidates also need an answer. Only a handful of technology companies may be willing to go public before Anthropic, one senior executive at an investment bank noted. Companies such as Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX can list in almost any market because of their growth and importance to investors. More conventional technology companies do not have that luxury.

Smaller IPOs with a specific investor audience should still be able to find buyers. There are several pools of money available, ranging from public and crossover funds to sovereign wealth funds, family offices, and offshore investors.

Larger offerings requiring support from across the market could find it more difficult to compete. “Anthropic is sort of going to suck the money out of the capital markets to some extent,” the senior executive said.

SpaceX helped open the market and has continued to trade well, including after the expiry of its lock-up period. But the number of technology companies waiting to list continues to grow, and many may prefer to see how Anthropic prices and trades before taking their own chance. “There is just so much focus on Anthropic right now that I think people may just want to wait to get that behind them before going public,” he said.

For all the attention around the IPO, investors still have not seen the figures they will need to decide what Anthropic is worth. An independent advisor identified four numbers that will matter most: revenue growth, gross margins, cash flow, and compute obligations.

These figures should show how much Anthropic must spend to generate its revenue and whether the company can eventually turn its rapid growth into meaningful cash flow. The reported USD 2tn valuation is not set in stone, despite the fear of missing out created by the performance of SpaceX and the wider demand for AI exposure. “If the big long-only investors and the buy side say, ‘No, not USD 2tn or USD 2.5tn,’ then Anthropic will not be able to come at USD 2tn,” the investor said, adding: “This isn’t Elon Musk and SpaceX.”

A delay could give Anthropic the chance to include 3Q figures and show how it is competing following OpenAI’s launch of GPT-6 Astra, the advisor said.

OpenAI has indicated that it is prepared to wait before pursuing its own listing. Given the questions surrounding the sector, that could prove the more reasonable approach, the advisor added. Anthropic, on the other hand, faces pressure to prove that its growth can support both its valuation and the cost of developing frontier models. Open-source models remain a small part of the market but are gaining users. If that continues, cheaper alternatives could put pressure on the pricing power and margins of companies such as Anthropic.

The ECM banker was less concerned that warnings about AI would weaken institutional demand for the IPO. Public and retail investors may react more strongly to Amodei’s comments, but large private investors still expect the use of AI to expand. Several mutual fund investors that already own Anthropic privately “want Dario [Amodei] to shut up,” the banker said, but remain committed to the sector.

Anthropic’s longer-term aim is to become the platform on which companies build AI applications, much as AWS and Microsoft Azure provide the infrastructure for cloud computing. Pricing and gross margins still need to be worked out, the banker said, but that does not mean the model cannot develop over time.

The S-1 risk factors will receive almost as much attention as the financial statements. Anthropic will need to explain risks ranging from competition and the cost of computing capacity to regulation and the possibility that its technology behaves in ways the company did not intend.

The advisor described the disclosure as a potential legal nightmare, but one ECM lawyer was less catastrophic. Securities lawyers have written risk factors for emerging technologies before, including during the rise of the internet in the 1990s. AI is different, but explaining a fast-changing and uncertain business remains part of the job, the lawyer said.

This lawyer was even less troubled by how Anthropic might disclose the ultimate risk.

“If the threat to humanity really comes true, there’s no one who can sue and say, ‘You didn’t tell us about the risk,’” the lawyer said.

A tougher window

These questions are coming to a head in a post-Labor Day IPO market that has been more volatile and less forgiving than issuers expected. Holtec Nuclear and CVC Capital Partners-backed home insurer Bamboo Insurance Services have both postponed IPOs over the past week, although their decisions point to different problems in the market. SB Energy and Aggreko, backed by TDR Capital and I Squared Capital, are also yet to pull the trigger.

“Clearly last week was a bad week in the market broadly, so that certainly didn’t help,” the ECM lawyer said. That leaves companies with strong enough growth and investor interest able to proceed but with less room to push on valuation or terms.

Anthropic is not an ordinary IPO candidate. Its size, growth, and position at the center of the AI market may allow it to list in conditions that would stop most companies. But even such a blockbuster candidate may have to compromise.

A choppier market could force the company to accept a lower valuation, sell more shares at the IPO price, or wait for better conditions. The longer it waits, however, the harder it becomes for other technology issuers to plan around it. Some investors may welcome the uncertainty, which may prompt companies to price offerings more sensibly than in an extremely bullish arena. Those conditions tend to produce less inflated valuations and order books with less short-term money.

“Clearly, it’s not ‘all systems go,’ but it’s also not like the market has shut down either,” the lawyer said. “So it’s sort of in between.”

“Investors are absolutely holding money back for Anthropic should it come this year,” said the second ECM banker. “If it launches later than expected it might just shut the market for the rest of the year.”