Anthropic is AI trade’s last big hope for a major IPO this year

Heading into 2026, investors were excited at the prospect of a host of new initial public offerings, including ones from mega-cap private companies like SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI. 

But now investors will have to settle for less than they expected at the start of the year, with OpenAI ruling out its debut on the public markets in 2026 and several other planned offerings postponed this year. 

On prediction market platform Kalshi, speculators think the only major company left that might officially announce an IPO this year is Anthropic, which confidentially filed a prospectus with the Securities and Exchange Commission in early June. 

The market on Kalshi asks traders if they think a series of companies will officially announce an IPO in 2026. The question of what constitutes an official announcement is resolved by the SEC declaring a company’s S-1 effective, an IPO pricing or an exchange assigning a ticker to the stock. Contracts are resolved using various news outlets as sources. 

Of the 23 companies that Kalshi lists on its market that remain open to trade, only Anthropic offers greater than 50% odds — 75% as of Monday morning — to officially announce an IPO this year. 

Traders in January gave financial technology company Plaid 50% odds to debut on the public markets this year. They now place just a 10% chance the company, reportedly valued at $8 billion in the private market, goes public. 

Human resources and payroll platform Deel had 50-50 odds as recently as February, but now speculators see only a 3% chance the company goes public in 2026. Cloud and artificial intelligence platform Databricks’ odds are just 1%, after seeing more than 50% odds in January. 

Similarly, OpenAI — Anthropic’s chief rival — has just a 3% chance of going public after CEO Sam Altman said last month it didn’t make sense to go public amid concerns over AI safety. Traders on Kalshi carry just 50-50 odds OpenAI makes an official IPO announcement by June 2027. 

Growing postponements

IPO postponements, from across sectors, have grown in recent weeks. And while IPO proceeds this year are up sharply, driven by mega-cap debuts, notably SpaceX in June, the number of U.S. IPOs priced this year is actually down 33% compared with 2025, according to Renaissance Capital. 

Investors are betting on major AI companies, as well as those whose products are contributing to the AI build-out, to move from private to public markets as they seek larger pools of capital to finance development. Many have grown at a blistering pace, and public markets are seen as the next step to support that growth. 

Optimistic growth assumptions were called into question last week, however, when Anthropic revealed its revenue totaled $16.8 billion in the third quarter, weaker quarter-over-quarter growth than in past periods. 

“More questions than answers emerged around the reasons for revenue growth deceleration in September and whether Anthropic can grow revenue at the rate the market is expecting given dynamics such as [large language model] pricing pressure,” wrote 22V Research analyst Dauvin Peterson on Sunday. “At the end of the day, the revised IPO valuation range starting at $1.5T vs the prior expectation of at least $2T was viewed as disappointing and added fuel to the fire for the AI-related equities that were already under pressure.”

Disclosure: CNBC and Kalshi have a commercial relationship that includes customer acquisition and a minority investment.