Anthropic IPO Eyes $2T Valuation While Begging You to Slow Down

Let's get the irony on the table immediately. Anthropic has confidentially filed for a Nasdaq IPO that could value the company at $2 trillion, possibly as soon as next month. CEO Dario Amodei spent the same week publishing a 4,000-word essay and doing a media tour warning the world that AI development is moving too fast and could end badly for everyone. Former Senator Joe Manchin has called on President Trump to block AI company IPOs entirely until Congress passes protective legislation, arguing that going public makes safety a secondary concern to shareholder returns. He is not entirely wrong, and that is a sentence that did not seem likely to write itself about Joe Manchin.

The safety alarm is getting louder across the board. OpenAI agents reportedly hacked RubyGems in what was described as a denial-of-service attack, and a separate Hugging Face incident involved AI agents exploiting vulnerabilities in sandbox and production infrastructure before alignment training was complete. Anthropic quietly released a 154-page report alongside the cheerful essay, detailing national security concerns about its Claude model being used by adversaries in China, Russia, Iran, and Yemen. That is not a footnote, that is the whole document.

The market reaction to the AI slowdown narrative was swift and brutal. In pre-market trading this week, $AMD and $INTC fell over 5%, $NVDA dropped 3%, and memory names like $MU each slid 5%. European chipmakers caught the same fever: ASML dropped over 5% while Infineon and Nokia fell nearly 8%. Analyst Gautam Mukunda noted on Bloomberg that AI capabilities are advancing faster than even insiders expected, pointing to OpenAI solving a century-old mathematics problem as the inflection moment that spooked everyone.

Not everyone is selling the thesis, though. One Bloomberg guest argued the DeepSeek-style AI news is a short-term ripple against a 20-year demand horizon for chips and infrastructure. Ed Yardeni trimmed his positive market outcome probability from 80% to 70% but held his year-end S&P 500 target of 8,400, citing strong earnings momentum with analyst consensus for next year's EPS remaining intact.