‘Stoked greed a lot more than fear’: Anthropic IPO filing revives faith in AI stocks

Anthropic, the developer of Claude, has disclosed its financial results to investors ahead of its IPO. The filing from the first leading AI lab to go public arrived at a difficult time for the market, Bloomberg notes. Over the last two weeks, investors have questioned the sustainability of the AI boom and largely sold off AI stocks. Last Thursday, for example, marked the Nasdaq Composite’s worst day since June.

The Anthropic prospectus, however, appears to have settled markets, Bloomberg writes. Following its release, the S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite are rising for a second consecutive day, up 0.3% and 0.7% on Tuesday, respectively. Here is what market participants took away from the financial disclosures.

Diversified customer base

Surging revenue probably came as little surprise to investors, but they were impressed by the breadth and diversity of Anthropic’s adoption among business customers, Bloomberg notes. “To me, what’s more important is that their recurring revenue’s coming from both an increasing number of enterprise customers, and it’s not concentrated,” Max Gokhman, head of AI and digital asset solutions at Franklin Templeton, told Bloomberg. According to the prospectus, around 79% of Anthropic’s revenue in the first nine months of 2026 came from outside of its five largest customers. “That’s a pretty solid figure,” Gokhman believes.

Cash cushion

Another figure that caught the market’s attention was the $131.7 billion in cash and cash equivalents on the company’s balance sheet at the end of June. Tema ETFs Chief Investment Officer Yuri Khodjamirian called that surprising for a company that has raised $141.1 billion since its founding. “If you just take one number versus the other, that suggests that to date this company has spent $9 billion basically building this business,” he said. “They have a lot of future commitments to compute, there’s a lot of lease commitments, things like that that come in the future. But that’s quite remarkable.” He added that one of the more encouraging takeaways was that the company had enough cash on its balance sheet to sustain its future growth.

Pressure on rivals to raise capital

Large AI companies now worry about “being left out,” said Alexander Morris, chief investment officer at FM Investments. He described the thinking among Anthropic’s rivals: “When someone does something, we have to put our marker in too, just to remind people don’t spend all your money on this flashy new thing.” Meta, which also develops generative AI, increased its planned sale of common and preferred stock from $95 billion to almost $98 billion after Anthropic released its prospectus, Bloomberg notes. “They’re smart to say let’s get a bunch of capital while we can because it may feel somewhat expensive today, but if the AI debt fears come true, it’s going to be really expensive next year when they really, really need it,” Morris said.

The Nasdaq 100 rose 1.1% on Monday following two consecutive weeks of declines, while the S&P 500 gained 0.7% and the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index climbed 2.8%. All three have extended their gains on Tuesday. “Certainly the Anthropic S-1 has stoked greed a lot more than fear,” Gokhman of Franklin Templeton said. “There’s a lot in that S-1 that’s not super surprising to folks who’ve been paying close attention, but it kind of confirms the enterprise growth potential. And I think that is probably one of the biggest reasons we’re seeing the broader complex of AI-related stocks kind of pick up, since they were the ones that were really getting beaten down over the last couple of weeks, it makes sense that we’re seeing that rebound.”

Markets welcomed the filing despite the numerous risks to which Anthropic devoted almost 100 pages of its prospectus. Among them, the AI developer listed its ability to continue developing “the most advanced and capable AI models,” as well as the “catastrophic or existential risks to humanity” that AI could pose without appropriate safeguards and oversight.

The selloff in AI stocks over the last two weeks was driven in part by investor concerns about the debt financing the infrastructure build-out and the returns on massive investments. Last week, reports of Meta’s huge capex sent investors fleeing risk assets. In addition, as early as mid-October, some investors lowered their valuation expectations for Anthropic’s upcoming IPO from $2 trillion to around $1.5 trillion amid slower revenue growth and concerns about returns on infrastructure investment.