Anthropic's upcoming IPO prospectus will list public opposition to AI and data centers as a key risk factor, even as investors project the company could debut at a valuation of approximately $2 trillion, according to people familiar with the matter.
Anthropic is preparing to go public at a valuation investors project could reach approximately $2 trillion, but the Claude maker's IPO prospectus will acknowledge a significant headwind: a growing public and political backlash against artificial intelligence and the data centers that power it, according to people familiar with the matter.
The company, which confidentially filed to go public in June, has been holding preliminary "test-the-water" meetings with bankers and investors in San Francisco, the people said, asking not to be named because the sessions are confidential.
In those meetings, Chief Financial Officer Krishna Rao is fielding questions about competitive pressure, margin compression from open-source AI models, and the implications of any slowdown in data center construction, the sources said.
Compute capacity is directly correlated to revenue for AI laboratories like Anthropic, which recently crossed a $65 billion annual revenue run rate. Any deceleration in infrastructure buildout could dent that trajectory.
Public sentiment on that infrastructure is decidedly negative. A Gallup survey published in May found that seven in 10 Americans oppose AI data center construction in their area, with close to half of respondents "strongly opposed." Roughly a quarter of those surveyed expressed support.
That opposition is now translating into policy. With midterm elections less than three months away, politicians from both parties have moved to restrict data center development. Florida's Republican gubernatorial primary on Tuesday — won by Representative Byron Donalds, who has proposed limitations on data center construction in the state — highlighted how central the issue has become to voters. On the same day, Pennsylvania Democratic Governor Josh Shapiro signed an executive order placing stringent standards on data center development in his state.
Anthropic's expected risk disclosures come as the company enters a market that has already seen a defining benchmark: Elon Musk's SpaceX raised $85.7 billion in its IPO two months ago — including the underwriter option — making it by far the largest public offering on record. Investors anticipate Anthropic may surpass that figure.
Anthropic is not alone in facing infrastructure constraints. Rival OpenAI has similarly pushed infrastructure partners to accelerate data center buildouts to keep pace with demand for advanced models and new services. The industry's major cloud providers are collectively spending hundreds of billions of dollars this year on capital expenditures, covering both facility construction and the graphics processing units needed to fill them.
Companies are required by securities law to disclose material risks in their IPO prospectuses, both as investor protection and legal safeguard. SpaceX, for instance, included a broad macroeconomic and geopolitical risk factor in its own filing.
Anthropic's situation is distinct in that the primary risk is not abstract economic volatility but rather a named, measurable shift in public opinion directly targeting the company's core infrastructure requirements.
Anthropic declined to comment.
The timing of Anthropic's public filing has not been announced, though sources indicated the prospectus is expected to be released in the coming weeks. How investors weigh the data center backlash against the company's revenue trajectory — and whether Anthropic's projected valuation holds at the public pricing stage — will be among the defining questions of what could be a record-setting market debut.
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