Anthropic Files for Nasdaq IPO as Cramer Warns Mega-Listings Could Strain Market

The five-year-old company, creator of the Claude assistant, is already being measured by investors as a potential trillion-dollar business. According to CNBC, Anthropic would be the third company to go public with a valuation above $1 trillion, after Saudi Aramco and Elon Musk's SpaceX, which debuted in June. OpenAI could be the fourth: it has confidentially filed to go public but has said a debut is likely not to take place until 2027.

Anthropic's financials show both rapid growth and the scale of its spending. Second-quarter revenue soared to $11.56 billion from $787 million a year earlier, a 14-fold increase. Investors are being asked to look past more than $80 billion in losses in the first half of the year, according to CNBC. After five quarters of operating losses, Anthropic reported $974 million in operating income for the second quarter and held almost $132 billion in cash, equivalents and short-term investments at the end of June.

The company's business is deeply tied to technology megacaps. Close to half its revenue comes from Claude being sold through cloud divisions at Microsoft, Amazon and Alphabet, all of which hold investments in Anthropic. In the IPO, some $77 billion in notes can be issued to Amazon, Broadcom and Google, while Microsoft and Nvidia agreed to invest $15 billion as Anthropic builds computing capacity. Alphabet, which has an investment-grade credit rating, committed to backstopping Anthropic for a data center in Texas.

CNBC's Jim Cramer warned on Monday that a wave of massive IPOs and capital raises could threaten the bull market. He said Anthropic's filing moves one of Wall Street's most anticipated debuts closer, but that potentially huge fundraising needs could strain an already crowded market. With $148 billion raised through IPOs so far this year, Cramer fears an influx of new shares could outstrip investor demand.

"Politics can weaken the bull, higher rates can choke it, but if you want to slay the darn thing, use the IPO lance and stab it again and again," Cramer said on "Mad Money." He emphasized that his concern is not the viability of AI itself. Unlike speculative internet startups that collapsed during the dot-com bust in 2000, many of today's leading technology companies have established businesses and real demand for their products, he said. The troubling similarity, in his view, is the enormous amount of capital being raised: during the dot-com boom, a flood of stock offerings eventually exhausted investors' buying power.

Cramer said companies including Meta, Alphabet, SpaceX and Oracle are tapping capital markets, and those fundraising efforts could absorb dollars that might otherwise flow into the S&P 500 and other stocks. "I think both the debt and the equity markets are running out of money," he said. "I am not calling a top. I am just saying that I do not like what I see." Cramer's Charitable Trust, the portfolio run by CNBC's Investing Club, owns shares of Meta and Alphabet.

The market backdrop has already shown jitters around the AI trade. Neoclouds and data center companies have been getting pummeled, prompting Australia's Firmus to withdraw its IPO plans and SK Hynix's U.S.-based Solidigm unit to do the same, CNBC reported. "If it underperforms expectations, it'll be a little bit of a house of cards," said Jai Das, co-founder of Sapphire Ventures. Brad Bernstein, a managing partner at FTV Capital, said a weak performance would make Anthropic a bellwether for AI and have a "trickle-down effect" on private AI valuations.

Bloomberg's Businessweek Daily podcast reported that Anthropic's prospectus flagged various "risks to humanity," including attempts to "resist shutdown" and "conceal or manipulate information," and emphasized the potential for its AI to "behave in unintended, misaligned, or autonomous ways." The prospectus named OpenAI and Google as competitors while saying Anthropic faces competition from a broader set of model providers, including open-weight or open-source models. Anthropic said Fortune 500 companies committed less than 0.1% of their total expenses to its models and services in the latest quarter. Rohit Kulkarni of Burnham Park Capital Markets said the financials were "better than feared."

Editor's Summary Anthropic's filing puts a trillion-dollar AI listing before public investors and will test demand after a year of heavy equity raising. Its rapid revenue growth and large losses underscore the scale of the bet, while Jim Cramer and other investors warn that mega-offerings could absorb market liquidity. A weak debut would pressure private AI valuations and the broader technology trade.