Dario Amodei, co-founder and chief executive officer of Anthropic, during an interview at Anthropic's headquarters in San Francisco, California, US, on Thursday, April 30, 2026.
Anthropic is poised to hit the public market at a time when an increasing number of Americans are worried about artificial intelligence and are loudly opposing new data centers. That backlash is expected to be a key risk factor in Anthropic's IPO prospectus, according to people familiar with matter.
The Claude creator has been holding preliminary "test-the-water" meetings with bankers and investors in San Francisco, said the people, who asked not to be named because the sessions are confidential. In the meetings, CFO Krishna Rao is being asked about competition, margin pressure from open-source models, and what happens if there's a slowdown in the building of data centers, the sources said.
In June, Anthropic confidentially filed to go public in what will be among the biggest IPOs on record. Elon Musk's SpaceX , which competes with Anthropic through its AI division, raised $85.7 billion, including the underwriter option, two months ago. It's by far the largest offering to date.
Investors expect that Anthropic may top that, and project the company could float at a valuation of about $2 trillion, the people said.
Anthropic declined to comment.
Like rival OpenAI , Anthropic is pushing infrastructure partners to build out at warp speed in order to meet demand for advanced models and new services. Tech's hyperscalers are shelling out hundreds of billions of dollars this year on capital expenditures to fuel data center develop and purchase the graphics processing units needed to fill them.
But public sentiment isn't in their favor.
According to a Gallup survey published in May, seven in 10 Americans opposed AI data center construction in their area, with close to half of those polled "strongly opposed." Roughly a quarter of people surveyed are in favor, Gallup said.
