Anthropic IPO faces dual pressure from investor valuation doubts and NYC comptroller safety call

Anthropic’s anticipated initial public offering is encountering headwinds from two directions: a public call by New York City’s top financial officer to postpone the listing over safety concerns, and a growing debate among investors over whether the company’s valuation should be trimmed by roughly a quarter-trillion dollars.

New York City Comptroller Mark Levine, who oversees the city’s $330 billion pension system, sent an open letter to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei asking the artificial intelligence company to pause its IPO plans until it addresses safety risks it has previously raised. The letter cited reports that Anthropic’s S-1 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission warned that advanced AI could pose “catastrophic or existential risks to humanity,” with AI-related risk disclosure spanning 80 pages of the prospectus — nearly double the length of the business description.

“By their own admission, they are building a technology which poses an existential risk,” Levine told CNBC, according to a report from Gizmodo. “The IPO will undoubtedly distract them from the safety work. Once they are then public, they are going to have new pressures on growth and profits that are going to push against the safety work.”

Levine said the New York City pension funds are exposed to Anthropic and that he wants “transparency” and “confidence before this is a publicly listed company.” He warned that “the ultimate catastrophe would be that they go public and then have an unprecedented safety crisis” that would “tank their stock and reverberate through the market.”

The comptroller’s letter referenced Amodei’s September 12 essay, “We Must Pace the Frontier,” in which the CEO stated: “Over the last few months, I have become convinced that fully addressing the risks requires even more prudence … We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models.”

**Investor valuation debate**

Separately, some current and prospective Anthropic investors are discussing a lower valuation for the company after its latest financial disclosures, four people familiar with the matter told Reuters. At Anthropic’s investor day on Wednesday in San Francisco, some attendees discussed a valuation of around $1.5 trillion, three of the people said — a significant step down from the roughly $2 trillion valuation that investors had previously expected for the November share sale.

At the meeting, Anthropic told prospective IPO investors that its third-quarter revenue jumped 45% to $16.8 billion from the previous quarter, and that it was profitable on an adjusted basis during the quarter. While those numbers assuaged some concerns about the massive costs of developing AI systems, some investors were disappointed by the slowing sequential growth rate, as Anthropic’s revenue more than doubled from the first quarter to $11.6 billion in the second quarter, the people added.

The Financial Times reported that the billions in revenue growth still came in below expectations, as investors in attendance were unhappy that the pace of growth was slowing.

The Information earlier reported that investors were considering a lower valuation, according to Reuters.

**Broader market and regulatory context**

A cooler reception for Anthropic’s IPO could weigh on the wider AI market, whose near-term prospects investors see as hinging largely on the share sale’s success, followed by OpenAI’s potential listing next year, Reuters reported. The IPO market has suffered recent setbacks, after data center operator SB Energy delayed its listing last month and nuclear technology company Holtec Nuclear pulled its plans to go public.

Levine’s intervention follows OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s statement last month that he was postponing his company’s IPO to deal with safety and alignment concerns as a private company. “I actually think that, given everything happening with safety, this would right now be an ill-advised moment to go public, and we don’t feel pressure on that,” Altman told Fortune, as reported by Gizmodo.

Anthropic’s IPO prospectus, seen exclusively by Reuters in September, laid out a vision that AI will transform the global economy more profoundly than industrialization, electricity and the internet, even as it reported a loss of $42 billion in 2025 and projected more spending for the upcoming AI buildout. The company has committed to spending at least $518 billion over a decade for cloud services, computing and infrastructure.

Ahead of its IPO, Anthropic received a BB+ credit rating from ratings agency KBRA — one notch below investment grade, according to ai-cio.com.