Billionaire investor Bill Ackman called Anthropic “perhaps the greatest business story” he has ever seen, but said his hedge fund Pershing Square likely will not buy shares in the artificial intelligence company ahead of its planned public listing. Speaking during a Bloomberg TV interview on Wednesday, Ackman highlighted Anthropic’s revenue growth and its Claude product, while explaining that Pershing Square prefers predictable businesses such as Microsoft, S&P Global, Visa, and Mastercard.
“Anthropic is perhaps the greatest business story I’ve ever seen,” Ackman said. He added that his fund avoids fast-growing companies that use large amounts of cash and rely on future profits catching up to current spending. Ackman also raised doubts about how long leading AI companies can defend their edge, pointing to open source and open weight models as cheaper competitors.
Anthropic is considering launching its initial public offering as soon as mid-November, potentially beginning trading before the Thanksgiving holiday, according to Bloomberg News sources. Formal marketing could start as early as the week of November 9, and the company is still expected to go public no later than the end of the year, though the timeline could change.
Leaked financial details show Anthropic’s 2025 revenue grew roughly twelvefold to nearly $4.6 billion from $386 million in 2024. Net losses reached almost $42 billion, up about fivefold from $8.3 billion a year earlier, while the operating loss expanded to more than $8 billion. More than $34 billion of the net loss came from a change in the fair value of liabilities. Despite the losses, prospective investors are said to view Anthropic at a valuation between $1.8 trillion and $2 trillion.
Anthropic’s IPO filing highlights deep infrastructure ties with Broadcom, Amazon and others. Broadcom has agreed to lend Anthropic up to $42 billion to finance infrastructure spending, a relationship that could make Anthropic Broadcom’s largest chip design customer next year. The convertible note could finance about a third of Anthropic’s $125.2 billion commitment for a five-year lease of TPU computing capacity.
Anthropic faces intensifying competition from OpenAI, which has gained sales momentum and also postponed its IPO plans. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has argued that the pace of AI advances should slow, publishing an essay focused on the need to “pace the frontier.” The IPO would land in a challenging market for new listings, where the weighted-average return for more than 100 newly listed stocks is a loss of 4% this year, compared with a 12% gain for the S&P 500 and a 20% rise for the Nasdaq 100.
According to an August filing, Pershing Square owns shares in Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft, showing Ackman is investing in AI through established companies rather than newer startups.
