Wall Street Splits on Anthropic's IPO: Wedbush Sees a Floodgate, Zacks Sees a Top

When Anthropic filed its confidential S-1 with the Securities and Exchange Commission on June 1, the reaction from analysts was fast, loud, and split nearly down the middle. On one side stood Wedbush Securities and a cluster of technology-focused funds calling it the clearest proof yet that AI infrastructure revenue is real and durable. On the other stood equity strategists who see a near-$1 trillion price tag on a company that has never posted annual profit, and who hear echoes of 1999.

The Bull Case: Revenue Velocity Nobody Expected

Dan Ives, Wedbush's global head of technology research, has been the most vocal of the optimists. His argument centers less on the valuation itself and more on the speed of the underlying revenue growth. Twelve months ago Anthropic was tracking roughly $10 billion in annualized revenue. As of the May 28 Series H close, that number had reached $47 billion, a pace of growth that Ives describes as unprecedented for an enterprise software company at this scale. He has called the filing "an opening of the floodgates for the IPO market, which has been relatively dormant for a few years," and positioned Anthropic as the first in a wave of three trillion-dollar-class offerings expected this cycle, alongside SpaceX and OpenAI.

The revenue story has specific texture. Claude Code alone crossed a $2.5 billion annualized run rate since its launch, a figure that enterprise software analysts say is among the fastest product-level ramps ever recorded. Anthropic counts more than 300,000 business customers and says eight of the Fortune 10 use Claude in some capacity. Those numbers, Ives argues, are not projections. They are invoices. The key question the S-1 will answer, and which no one outside the company has seen yet, is gross margin. If Claude's infrastructure costs have been declining fast enough to support software-like margins, the valuation becomes more defensible.

The Bear Case: Gross Margins and Ghost of Dot-Com

John Blank, chief equity strategist at Zacks, offered a blunter read. "I see it as a market top," he told investors, drawing an explicit parallel to the late-1990s wave of loss-making technology companies that went public at astronomical valuations before the market corrected sharply. His concern is structural: all three of the major AI labs racing toward public markets, Anthropic, SpaceX, and OpenAI, are still spending more than they earn. Anthropic has guided toward its first-ever profitable quarter but has not yet delivered one. The moment that changes, and the moment the S-1 discloses gross margins, the private-market narrative will meet public-market scrutiny for the first time.

The tension between those two views is the story of the next several months. Institutional investors will spend the SEC review period modelling scenarios around compute cost deflation, the durability of enterprise AI spending, and whether Anthropic's safety-focused positioning translates into pricing power or merely goodwill. Some investors, including Michael Burry, have already flagged concerns about the assumptions baked into AI infrastructure valuations. The S-1 will resolve some of those questions. Others will only become clear after a few earnings cycles.

"The most scrutinized public offering in tech history. The critical metric that will determine everything is gross margin, which no one outside Anthropic has ever seen, and which will either validate or collapse the entire narrative the private markets have been pricing." Wall Street analyst commentary, Reuters, June 2026

What the Filing Means for Claude's Competitive Position

Beyond the financial debate, the filing has a practical effect on Anthropic's competitive standing. Going public forces a level of transparency about revenue mix, customer concentration, and product economics that private companies routinely avoid. Rivals OpenAI and Google DeepMind will be able to read the S-1 as carefully as any investor. That is a cost. The benefit is capital access and the credibility signal that comes from a successful listing at scale.

Anthropic's decision to file before OpenAI is also notable. OpenAI's own IPO process has been in motion for months, but Anthropic moved first, positioning itself to set the pricing reference point for the category. If Anthropic's offering prices at a premium and trades well in the aftermarket, it strengthens the case for OpenAI's own valuation. If it struggles, the opposite is true. The two companies are competing on benchmarks, on enterprise contracts, and now, implicitly, on public-market perception. The race to Wall Street has become another front in the AI competition.

Ives's list of the broader AI stocks most likely to benefit from Anthropic's momentum includes the major cloud providers with heavy Claude exposure, semiconductor suppliers feeding the inference buildout, and enterprise software companies that have built Claude integrations into their platforms. His thesis is that a successful Anthropic IPO, at whatever valuation the market ultimately assigns, validates the entire AI infrastructure investment cycle rather than just one company. Blank's counter is that validation at this scale, with this level of unresolved uncertainty about profitability, is exactly the kind of event that historically marks a cycle peak rather than a cycle beginning.