3 Historical Reasons I’ll Be Completely Avoiding Anthropic’s Upcoming and Potentially Record
3 Historical Reasons I’ll Be Completely Avoiding Anthropic’s Upcoming and Potentially Record-Breaking IPO
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If you thought Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) (NASDAQ:SPCX) was the stand-out initial public offering (IPO) of 2026, you might be sorely mistaken. Although SpaceX rewrote Wall Street’s record books with its $1.77 trillion IPO, which raised a record $85.7 billion, including the underwriters’ overallotment, artificial intelligence (AI) start-up Anthropic aims to knock SpaceX from its pedestal.
The developer of the increasingly popular Claude large language model has already confidentially filed the necessary paperwork to go public and is widely expected to publish its registration statement (i.e., prospectus) after the Labor Day holiday. It’s believed that Anthropic is seeking a late-September or early-October listing and a staggering $2 trillion valuation.
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While there’s little doubt that retail investors will be lining up for their chance to buy into this hypergrowth opportunity, I won’t be one of them. I’ll be completely avoiding Anthropic’s potentially record-breaking IPO for three historical reasons.
1. Tech-driven IPOs often stumble out of the starting gate
To begin with, tech-focused IPOs have been retail investor traps, more often than not, over the last 14 years.
In early June, before SpaceX went public, Truist Financial (NYSE:TFC) published the performance of the last 30 major tech-driven IPOs since mid-2012. Truist found that the average tech-focused IPO endured a year-one maximum drawdown of 55%! For context, SpaceX’s all-time high-to-record-low drawdown is 54% thus far.
Truist’s data set exposes the emotional aspect of IPO investing and the unsustainable nature of IPO buzz. While Anthropic was able to generate a small adjusted profit in the second quarter on more than $11.5 billion in sales Anthropic’s AI infrastructure build-out will cost a proverbial arm and a leg in the coming years and weigh heavily on its profit potential
2. Anthropic’s valuation is historically unsustainable
To state the obvious, valuing public companies involves some subjectivity, and there isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach. Nevertheless, one historically unblemished valuation metric suggests that retail investors who pile into Anthropic early will regret it.
Source: finance.yahoo.com
