Anthropic is growing rapidly ahead of an initial public offering expected this year, but investor skepticism is deepening amid the advance of Chinese open-source AI models, OpenAI's pursuit and debate over slowing AI development. The company is expected to delay its listing, previously anticipated in October, by one month. Anthropic's annualized revenue surged to $65 billion as of July and is projected to top $120 billion by the end of this year, the Financial Times reported on the 19th, saying the pace could make it the fastest-growing company in history. Anthropic, strong in enterprise AI, has been valued at $965 billion. Questions are emerging over whether it can keep growing: after releasing GPT-5.6 in July, OpenAI secured enterprise customers with aggressive pricing and overtook Anthropic in weekly customer spending on OpenRouter for the first time in two and a half years, with annualized revenue up about 20% since the July model release and a cumulative free cash flow deficit projected to reach $278 billion by 2030. Anthropic must also fend off low-cost Chinese open-source models from Moonshot AI and DeepSeek. CEO Dario Amodei has argued AI companies should slow development for safety, but critics say that does not help competition with China. Post-listing valuation forecasts range from $1.5 trillion to $4 trillion; Anthropic, targeting up to $2 trillion, pushed its listing to November from October, The Wall Street Journal reported,