Anthropic Leads 2026 IPO Bets as AI Listing Hopes Narrow
Anthropic is the only company among 23 still-open Kalshi IPO markets with better-than-even odds of announcing a public offering in 2026. The shift comes as…
Anthropic is the only company with better-than-even odds of announcing an IPO in 2026 among 23 firms still listed in open Kalshi markets, a sign that investors’ anticipated wave of AI listings has narrowed sharply. What is AI’s place in the public markets? For now, traders are focused on whether Anthropic will make the move as growth concerns weigh on expectations.
Kalshi assigned Anthropic a 75% chance as of Monday morning, according to CNBC’s report published October 19. OpenAI has ruled out going public this year, while the odds for several other planned offerings have fallen.
The change matters to investors watching how private AI companies might seek capital in public markets. The number of U.S. IPOs priced this year is down 33% compared with 2025, according to Renaissance Capital, despite proceeds rising sharply as mega-cap companies went public.
Anthropic remains the leading IPO bet
Investors began 2026 expecting a group of large private companies, including SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI, to pursue public offerings. Several planned listings have since been postponed, and CNBC reported that other companies’ odds of going public declined throughout the year.
Kalshi’s market asks traders whether companies will officially announce an IPO in 2026. The market counts an announcement when the Securities and Exchange Commission declares a company’s S-1 effective, an IPO is priced or an exchange assigns a ticker. Contracts are resolved using reports from news outlets.
Anthropic confidentially filed a prospectus with the Securities and Exchange Commission in early June, according to CNBC. That filing has not, by itself, resolved the market question.
A short line in the odds: most rivals have faded.
Traders gave financial technology company Plaid a 50% chance of going public in January; the figure has since fallen to 10%. Deel, a human resources and payroll platform, had even odds as recently as February, but its current chance is 3%. Databricks, a cloud and artificial intelligence platform, is at 1% after exceeding 50% in January.
OpenAI, Anthropic’s chief rival, is also at 3% for an IPO in 2026. CEO Sam Altman said last month that going public did not make sense amid concerns about AI safety. Kalshi traders put the chance of an official OpenAI IPO announcement by June 2027 at 50-50.
Revenue growth complicates the listing case
The market’s remaining optimism around Anthropic faces a business question. The company reported revenue of $16.8 billion in the third quarter, but its quarter-over-quarter growth was weaker than in earlier periods, CNBC reported.
That slowdown has raised questions about whether the company can grow at the pace investors expect, particularly as large language model pricing comes under pressure. The assessment came from 22V Research analyst Dauvin Peterson, whom CNBC quoted in a Sunday note.
“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,” Peterson wrote.
Peterson also said a revised IPO valuation range starting at $1.5T, compared with a prior expectation of at least $2T, disappointed investors and added pressure to AI-related equities already under strain.
For companies developing AI products, public markets are viewed as a potential source of larger pools of capital to finance development, CNBC reported. Many have grown quickly, and investors have treated a listing as a possible next step. But the reduced odds across Kalshi’s markets show that anticipation has not translated into a broad set of expected offerings this year.
CNBC disclosed that it has a commercial relationship with Kalshi involving customer acquisition and a minority investment. Anthropic remains at 75% on Kalshi’s market as of Monday morning.
Source: cnbc.com
