That's 79 characters — check count. "Anthropic IPO Said to Draw $1.5 Trillion Valuation Talk, Down From $2 Trillion" — 7

Some current and prospective investors have floated a valuation of about $1.5 trillion for Anthropic's planned November listing, roughly $500 billion below the $2 trillion figure that had circulated earlier, according to Reuters, which cited investors who attended the company's investor day in San Francisco on Wednesday. At that level, Anthropic would still rank below SpaceX, which reached a $1.77 trillion valuation at its June listing.

At the investor day, Anthropic said it was profitable on an adjusted basis during the quarter and reported third-quarter revenue of $16.8 billion, a 45% increase. The growth rate nonetheless disappointed some attendees, since revenue had more than doubled to $11.6 billion in the second quarter.

Part of the deceleration was already apparent. Large customers Meta and Microsoft are leaning more on AI models they build in-house, and Anthropic has scaled back distillation work, a paid usage category that had generated 5% to 7% of revenue. Pricing is also under pressure: the company priced Claude Haiku 5.5 about 75% below its predecessor this month as low-cost Chinese labs push into the market.

Skepticism about the $2 trillion figure predates the investor day. Earlier this month, research firm New Constructs — which flagged WeWork in 2019 — valued Anthropic at $150 billion, writing, "We don't think Anthropic has a viable business."

How Anthropic ultimately prices matters beyond its own shareholders, because Big Tech's AI sales rely heavily on Anthropic and OpenAI. In August, Steve Eisman estimated the two labs accounted for roughly 70% of AI-related revenue at Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Oracle, describing that dependence as the Achilles' heel of the AI boom. Michael Burry has since said a bubble may burst sooner than the 2028 timeline he once expected, and former BitMEX CEO Arthur Hayes expects the data center boom to end in a crash and a multi-trillion-dollar bailout.

The valuation talk landed in a rough week for AI equities, with the 20 most valuable AI and chip names shedding more than $1 trillion, according to CNBC. Dell fell 6.8% on Thursday after an 11% drop the previous day, while CoreWeave plunged about 15% on Wednesday. Anthropic remains first in line to list, with OpenAI expected by early 2027, and analysts expect whichever lab goes public first to set the industry's pricing benchmark.