Anthropic’s trip to Wall Street may take a few weeks longer than investors expected.

The Claude maker is now expected to publicly file its IPO prospectus in late September rather than as early as this week, according to people familiar with the matter cited by Reuters. Marketing for the offering could begin in mid-October at the earliest, potentially putting a listing just days before the U.S. midterm elections in November.

The timetable remains fluid, but the stakes are unusually high. Some investors have discussed a valuation approaching $2 trillion, turning Anthropic’s IPO into a major test of how much public markets are willing to pay for the growth promised by leading AI companies.

Some investors have discussed a valuation approaching $2 trillion, which would put Anthropic among the largest companies ever to enter public markets at that scale. Such a valuation would put the offering among the biggest IPOs ever attempted and make it a major test of whether public markets are still willing to pay enormous prices for fast-growing AI businesses.

A major financing piece comes first

Anthropic is also working to finalize a $15 billion revolving credit facility, according to the sources. Once that financing is completed, analysts from banks involved in the deal are expected to meet with Anthropic.

Normally, companies leave several weeks between those analyst meetings and the public release of an IPO prospectus. Anthropic may move faster because analysts already know the company and its business well, Reuters reported. Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Citi are among the banks working on the IPO.

The size of the potential offering makes Anthropic unusual even by today’s AI standards. Some investors have floated a valuation of about $2 trillion, compared with the $1.77 trillion valuation at which SpaceX went public in June.

That expectation rests heavily on Anthropic’s growth. Two people familiar with the company’s finances, per BigGo Finance, noted that it is forecasting revenue of roughly $190 billion to $200 billion in 2028. Using future revenue to support such a large valuation highlights the central challenge for investors: Anthropic’s expected growth is doing much of the work in the valuation case, rather than today’s business alone.

Why the prospectus matters more than the delay

The revised timetable does not necessarily point to trouble. A more interesting possibility is that Anthropic is using the extra time to get its financing and IPO machinery aligned before entering a market that will scrutinize every number.

That could make the eventual prospectus more important than the delay itself. Investors will have to decide whether Anthropic’s projected growth can justify a valuation approaching $2 trillion, particularly as competition across AI continues to intensify.

For public-market investors, the IPO will therefore offer more than a chance to buy shares in the company behind Claude. It could become an early public test of how much Wall Street believes the AI boom is worth when those expectations have to be priced into a stock.

Anthropic’s IPO could therefore become one of the clearest tests yet of the gap between private-market AI expectations and public-market valuation discipline. The question will not simply be whether investors want exposure to Claude, but how much they are willing to pay today for revenue and profits that may still be years away.

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