AI-linked stocks came under heavy pressure on Monday after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and other industry leaders backed a slower approach to advancing frontier artificial intelligence models over safety concerns. The renewed safety debate coincided with reports that Anthropic has selected Nasdaq as the venue for a potential initial public offering that could value the Claude developer near $2 trillion.
D.A. Davidson added to the discussion by raising its Palantir price target to $250 from $200 and maintaining a Buy rating after AIPCon 11. Analyst Gil Luria argued that Palantir does not need to build the world's best AI model; it needs enterprises and governments to keep deploying AI. Luria said customers are becoming more sophisticated about choosing different models for different tasks and increasingly want control over their own data and infrastructure. He sees Palantir potentially becoming a control plane and orchestration layer for enterprise AI, which could benefit from fragmentation and slower frontier-model development.
Palantir's second-quarter results supported the bull case, with revenue up 93% year over year to $1.94 billion, US commercial revenue up 149% to $764 million, and US commercial total contract value up 153% to a record $2.13 billion. Rosenblatt analyst John McPeake reiterated a Buy rating and $225 target, citing a strong pipeline of potential commercial customer conversions. Palantir also has a partnership with Nvidia, which is deploying a Palantir-based sovereign AI stack across its supply chain. Still, Palantir trades at roughly 82 times expected forward earnings, and competition from Alphabet and other enterprise software vendors remains a risk.
On the IPO front, Anthropic has reportedly picked Nasdaq for its planned listing, with October 2026 under consideration. Its last confirmed private valuation was about $965 billion following a $65 billion funding round in May, but secondary-market activity has pushed expectations toward $2 trillion, above SpaceX's reported $1.75 trillion valuation. The company has reportedly told investors it expects positive adjusted operating income for a second consecutive quarter. Annualized revenue reportedly reached about $65 billion by July, up from roughly $9 billion at the end of the previous year, and second-quarter revenue was about $11.5 billion. Nvidia is also in discussions about a potential $10 billion investment as part of the IPO, while Reuters reported Anthropic could seek to raise as much as $100 billion.
The safety debate intensified after former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon criticized the AI race, and Anthropic safety researcher Evan Hubinger said he believed there was a greater than 10% chance AI could kill all humans within the next decade. Amodei wrote that We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman endorsed the idea, while Elon Musk posted Dario is right. The comments hit AI-related equities, with SoftBank falling as much as 13.2% in Japan and declines in Kioxia, SK Hynix, Samsung Electronics, and US chip names. Saxo Bank chief investment strategist Charu Chanana said elevated AI valuations assume strong demand and continued technological progress, meaning even a possible delay can trigger profit-taking.
