Three major investors planning to participate in Anthropic's IPO say its valuation will likely fall

WSJ says Democratic scrutiny of military spending could force tough Pentagon choices

The Wall Street Journal’s Technology newsletter reported that Anthropic is aiming to stage the IPO the week before Thanksgiving. The company has been expected to raise up to $100 billion in an offering that could value it at around $1.5 trillion, but three major investors who plan to participate in the IPO said the valuation will likely need to come down, with one saying it could be closer to $1 trillion.

The same newsletter recounted how technology executives and investors gathered in Napa, California, for The Wall Street Journal’s Tech: California conference ahead of Election Day. It had looked as though Democrats would regain control of Congress, but backstage, Sarah Krouse, the Journal’s Tech and Media editor based in New York, wrote that her team and the conference speakers “furiously scrolled through election results backstage” and that “we saw the blue wave hit.”

In her newsletter recap, Krouse wrote that the changes America voted for “struck right at the heart of a Silicon Valley that had been on a tear.” She listed a data-center development boom powering the U.S. economy, Anthropic’s planned IPO and a spate of new breakthroughs from leading AI labs.

Krouse and her colleagues interviewed top executives like Meta’s Dina Powell McCormick and OpenAI’s Greg Brockman, major investors including Vinod Khosla and Sequoia’s Pat Grady, and key players in defense including Pentagon CTO Emil Michael at the conference. Krouse wrote, “They had a lot to say about what comes next.”

The newsletter said the prospect of Democratic scrutiny of military spending could force tough choices at the Pentagon. It also said novel biological and cyber threats posed by new, powerful AI tools loom large.

New data-center moratoriums are poised to make it harder for “America’s AI darlings” to secure computing power, the newsletter reported.

Americans’ vote for candidates and ballot measures to ban or slow data-center development could rein in AI’s rapid growth and become a big business problem for companies on the edge of technological progress, the newsletter reported. It said the choices also threaten to hobble an AI boom powering the U.S. economy.

The newsletter argued that a forced slowdown “might be exactly what some AI companies need right now.” It said the market’s major concern had not been AI’s growth potential, but the fear that building the capacity to meet that growth would prove so costly that even companies that won the AI race would end up much less profitable than envisioned.

The digest’s consumer-technology item said phones are getting bigger, laptops are becoming lighter and most people have both. It said tablets seemed to be facing an “existential crisis” and described them as “stuck in the middle,” while reporting that Apple and Amazon were releasing new tablet options.

A separate cybersecurity item asked whether the mathematical locks and keys securing bank accounts, email inboxes and everything else on the internet could prove less secure than assumed. The newsletter said new online security is rolling out to protect against quantum codebreakers, but AI mathematics advances might bring that reckoning earlier.

The election delivered what the newsletter called “a stunning blow” to Elon Musk’s political power. The newsletter said money could not buy everything, even for the world’s richest man, and that voters made that clear Tuesday. After spending over $440 million on the midterms, the Tesla and SpaceX chief executive will face a very different reception when Democrats take control of Congress, according to the recap.

A separate “Slowdown” item said the Apple growth-and-profit machine was wavering and that the boost from price increases might not be enough to keep it going at historic rates.

Google is turning off its Gemini chatbot and Search by default for schoolchildren after scrutiny of AI tools’ impact on academic and emotional development, the newsletter said.

The newsletter also described a wave of apparent cyberattacks cranking up the heat on supermarket freezers. It said the phenomenon illustrates how even mundane physical infrastructure is susceptible to hacking.

The newsletter also noted that people are using chatbots as divorce lawyers. The Technology newsletter is a weekly digest of technology reviews, columns and headlines from Anne Steele and Wilson Rothman.