AI Stocks Crash and Rebound: Anthropic’s $2 Trillion IPO Explained

By Muhammad Ramzan Aatish

AI stocks are shares of companies whose business, or whose valuation, more honestly, rides on artificial intelligence. Chipmakers like Nvidia. Cloud giants like Microsoft. And increasingly the AI labs themselves, even the ones that haven’t listed yet.

It has been a strange stretch to own a piece of that trade. First the industry’s own leaders asked everyone to slow down, and the market obliged by erasing hundreds of billions in AI-linked value in a single session. Then Anthropic, whose CEO wrote the essay that started it all, quietly pushed its stock-market debut to a later fall window, still chasing what investors expect could be a $2 trillion valuation, the largest IPO in history. Those two events pull in opposite directions. One says the AI trade is overheating. The other says the biggest private AI company on the planet expects the public market to pay up anyway. Both can’t be right forever. Both are true right now.

A Record Listing on a Shifting Schedule

The freshest development in this story arrived via the Wall Street Journal: Anthropic now plans to launch its initial public offering a little later this fall, pushed back from an earlier expected window so the company’s advisers can present its latest quarterly results first. The company filed its IPO paperwork confidentially earlier this year, and it has said all along that timing depends on market conditions. Dates move. This one already has.

The number attached to it is the one that makes headlines: investors are reportedly targeting a valuation of roughly $2 trillion, with a capital raise of up to $100 billion. Both would break the records set by SpaceX’s IPO earlier this year. Two things matter here, and the coverage is clear on both. First, the figures are investor expectations, not company guidance, Anthropic itself has confirmed neither a valuation nor a firm date. Second, the figures have held up across multiple outlets: PYMNTS reports the same $2 trillion and $100 billion numbers, and The Decoder independently confirms them while citing the Journal’s and The Information’s reporting. That’s about as solid as pre-IPO numbers get.

There is an irony at the center of this that’s hard to miss. In the same stretch that Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei published an essay urging the industry to deliberately slow frontier AI development, we covered the essay and its fallout in detail here, his own company was racing toward the most aggressive public listing in market history. Whatever Amodei thinks about the pace of capabilities, the company clearly believes the market will pay up for Claude. That contradiction is worth sitting with, because it’s the whole story in miniature: the people building the technology are simultaneously warning about it and monetizing it.

One rumor worth handling with tongs: WalletInvestor’s AI desk reports Anthropic is weighing a new model release timed against OpenAI’s next flagship, referred to in coverage as GPT-6 Astra. The logic is obvious, a company heading into a roadshow wants to look like it’s at or near the top of the field. But until Anthropic ships a model with published specifications, that’s positioning, not performance. Treat it as rumor.

OpenAI Is Reading the Same Room Differently

If Anthropic is sprinting toward the market, OpenAI is walking away from it. Sam Altman told Fortune in an interview earlier this month that an OpenAI listing would not happen this year: “Right now would be an ill-advised moment to go public,” he said, pointing at the safety debate. The company had already submitted confidential IPO paperwork earlier this year while publicly insisting it was in no rush. The paperwork exists. The appetite doesn’t.

The numbers explain the confidence. OpenAI says it is generating around $2 billion in revenue each month, and its most recent private valuation topped $850 billion. It is also building what it calls an “AI superapp”, ChatGPT, its coding tool Codex, and browsing bundled into one surface, a direct play for the consumer time currently spent inside Google’s products. A company with that kind of monthly revenue doesn’t need public-market money. It can afford to wait for better weather.

So here’s the split that matters for anyone watching AI stocks: the two leading labs looked at the same public-market room and reached opposite conclusions. Anthropic thinks investors will reward it this fall. OpenAI thinks a listing right now is a bad idea. That disagreement is itself a data point, about how uncertain the AI investment cycle has become, and about how little consensus there is even among the people closest to it.

One Session Wiped Billions Off the Board

To understand the current AI stocks moment, rewind to earlier this month. Over the preceding weekend, Amodei published his lengthy essay calling on AI companies to deliberately slow their most powerful models, citing safety risks. Altman and Elon Musk publicly backed the call. Markets did not take it well, because when the labs’ own leaders warn that AI needs guardrails, investors hear risk to the spending boom that lifted these shares, and the whole basket drops together.

The damage was broad and fast:

• Nvidia, the world’s most valuable company, fell 3.4 percent, closing around $210.96. AMD dropped 4 percent. Intel, Micron, Marvell and Sandisk each lost roughly 5 to 7 percent; Broadcom fell 4.5 percent.
• In Europe, ASML shed about 6 percent while ASM International lost nearly 9 percent.
• In Asia, SK Hynix fell more than 6 percent, Samsung over 4 percent, and SoftBank, a major OpenAI investor, plunged roughly 10 to 13 percent in Tokyo.
• The Nasdaq ended down 1.1 percent, and the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index lost 5.9 percent. Analysts put the global reassessment of AI investment at roughly $700 billion in a single session.

The telling detail is where the money went. Cybersecurity stocks rose over 13 percent in the same session, CrowdStrike alone jumped 15 percent, while enterprise software names like ServiceNow rallied. This is the rotation mechanism that matters: chip stocks depend on the AI buildout continuing to accelerate, because their revenue is the buildout. Software companies that had spent two years fearing AI would replace them suddenly looked like beneficiaries of a slower, steadier adoption curve. Same news, opposite trades. That split is now the defining structure of AI stocks, it’s also the lens for the cloud GPU demand feeding the whole trade, which doesn’t vanish just because the pace gets questioned.

Reading through the analyst commentary after that session, the line that stuck with me came from Panmure Liberum’s Joachim Klement, who called the selloff “a small taste of what the real end in the [AI spending] boom will look like.” Grim framing, but he’s pointing at something real: a development slowdown would brake the capital-expenditure boom that has driven global equity markets, and the market just showed how fast it reprices that risk.

Then politics walked in. President Donald Trump dismissed the slowdown calls as a “hoax” in a Truth Social post and during a call with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang that was broadcast from an AI conference stage in California. “The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT,” he wrote, adding: “WHOEVER WINS AI, WINS!” He also called for a White House meeting to unite AI leaders. The market response was immediate: Nvidia bounced 1.22 percent to $214.75 the following trading session. That’s the rebound in the headline, fast, politically driven, and partial. Meanwhile, House Republican leaders held a press conference calling for AI regulation and transparency, a reminder that Washington’s interest in the sector isn’t going anywhere regardless of who’s cheering it on.

The Case For and Against, Side by Side

Strip out the noise and the argument is one question: does the AI spending boom still have legs? Both sides have evidence worth taking seriously.

Both cases are live at the same time. The revenue is real. The fear is real. That tension is the volatility, and it’s what makes this particular stretch of AI stocks worth watching rather than just reading about.

What This Actually Means for Anyone Watching AI Stocks

First, the IPO, not the next model release, is the event to watch. The mid-month dip created entry points that partially bounced, but the volatility driver (the safety debate) hasn’t resolved. When Anthropic’s listing terms are announced, compare the valuation and raise size against the ~$2 trillion / ~$100 billion expectation: the gap between expectation and reality is what will reprice the whole sector. A clean landing lifts everything; a stumble hits chip stocks first. And underneath the listing sits the physical buildout, data-center power demand is already forcing national debates, as our coverage of the AI data center boom has been tracking.

Second, the rotation is real, and it’s now the market’s main language. The trade has split into picks-and-shovels (chips, which need the buildout to keep accelerating) and beneficiaries-of-adoption (software and cybersecurity, which do fine if AI simply spreads). That split explains CrowdStrike’s 15 percent jump on the same day Nvidia fell. The counterweight I keep returning to here came from Amati Global Investors’ Mikhail Zverev, who argued the selloff was short-term sentiment, his point being that even if AI never gets more capable than it is today, adoption alone would sustain semiconductor and data-center demand. Reading his take against Klement’s bearish one is genuinely clarifying: one prices in the boom ending, the other prices in the boom not needing to continue. Both can’t be right. The market hasn’t decided.

Third, politics is now a permanent factor in AI stocks. A US president is publicly intervening in the AI investment narrative. Congress is holding AI-regulation press conferences. A UN Security Council session on AI was on the schedule. For a sector that used to move on benchmark scores and funding rounds, geopolitics and regulation are now first-order price drivers. Anyone modeling AI stocks on fundamentals alone is modeling half the picture.

A short watch-list, drawn from everything above:

• IPO terms vs expectations. When the listing details land, measure the announced valuation and raise against the ~$2T/~$100B expectation, that delta moves the sector.
• Anthropic’s next revenue print. The roadshow story is growth at scale; watch whether the reported $4.7B→$11.5B trajectory holds.
• The chips-vs-software split. When semiconductor indices and cybersecurity names move in opposite directions, the market is repricing the pace of the buildout, not AI itself.
• Roadshow-season rumors. Treat model-release chatter timed to the IPO as positioning until something ships with published specs.

FAQ

The Bottom Line on AI Stocks

AI stocks just lived through a stretch that contained both the industry’s biggest warning and its biggest bet, at the same time, from the same company’s orbit. Nothing got resolved. The safety debate is still open, the spending boom is still running, and the listing that will test public-market appetite hasn’t happened yet. When it does, it’ll either be the verdict on this whole episode or the start of the next one.