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Anthropic‘s pre-IPO perpetual contract on Polymarket rallied 8% on Wednesday, as strong demand for the AI lab’s listing met a broad rebound in artificial intelligence stocks ahead of next week’s debut.

The contract, which trades under the ANT symbol and tracks Anthropic PBC‘s valuation, rose 8% over 24 hours to $1,836.10 in Wednesday afternoon trading. It swung between $1,685.40 and $1,868.10 during the session.

Polymarket’s contract takes its reference price from Entropy’s io:ANTH market on Hyperliquid, where each point equals $1 billion of fully diluted valuation. That puts the Claude maker at roughly $1.84 trillion.

The Hyperliquid market, which carries about $200 million in open positions, traded near 1,830 on Wednesday, up nearly 8% from the previous day. A separate per-share contract from trade.xyz points to a similar figure, trading at about $105, roughly 34% above the top of the IPO range.

The $1.84 trillion figure is about 31% above the $1.4 trillion fully diluted valuation implied by the top of Anthropic’s IPO range.

Why the Anthropic Perp Is Rallying Today

Three things moved the contract on Wednesday.

First, demand for the deal is building. The IPO has drawn orders several times larger than the shares on offer, Bloomberg reported on Wednesday, citing people familiar with the matter. Meanwhile, bankers are considering lifting the valuation to $1.5 trillion or more, according to the Financial Times.

On Tuesday, Anthropic launched its roadshow and set a range of $70 to $78 per share for 825 million shares. At the top, the offering would raise about $64.4 billion.

Second, the AI trade came back to life.

CoreWeave Inc. (NASDAQ:CRWV) soared 27% after third-quarter results, while Nvidia Corp. (NASDAQ:NVDA) gained 5%.

The Invesco QQQ Trust (NASDAQ:QQQ) rose 3.1%.

Third, Anthropic is moving deeper into the office.

At an event in San Francisco on Tuesday, the company unveiled Claude Sheets, a spreadsheet tool that competes with Excel, along with Claude Meetings and Claude Whiteboards.

As a result, Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ:MSFT) fell 2.1%.

What Analysts Are Saying About the Anthropic IPO

Analysts largely welcomed the lower range.

As recently as September, an earlier draft filing had Anthropic eyeing a valuation of around $2 trillion. The lower range came after a sharp sell-off in AI stocks last week.

“A deal of this size gets one shot at its debut, and making it digestible for the market matters more than the last turn of valuation,” Yorkville Ives analyst Dan Ives said in an investor note on Tuesday.

Ives added that the $26 billion private placement from Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOG)(NASDAQ:GOOGL), Nvidia, Microsoft, Broadcom (NASDAQ:AVGO) and three other partners may matter more than the headline size.

David Morrison, senior market analyst at Trade Nation, shared that view.

“Overall this was a good news story, in that Anthropic is prepared to accept a lower price rather than postponing the IPO amid all the tech-led market uncertainty,” Morrison said in an emailed note on Wednesday.

Meanwhile, Morningstar’s fair value sits closer to where the perpetual trades.

Morningstar analyst Malik Ahmed Khan values Anthropic’s equity at $1.7 trillion in his base case, with a bull case slightly above $3 trillion and a bear case of $500 billion. He expects revenue to grow at a 47% annual rate over the next five years.

“For every $1,000 a Fortune 500 client spends, only $1 currently goes to Anthropic,” Khan said in a recent report.

The Bear Case: Can Anthropic Outrun Its Own Costs?

Not everyone is convinced.

Dennis DeBusschere, founder of 22V Research, said the S-1 shows research and development spending far larger than the cost of serving customers. In his view, competition, not Anthropic, sets that bill.

“If that is true, Anthropic could start to look like a commoditized intelligence provider,” DeBusschere said in a note on Sunday.

He added that several quarters of official data, which a public Anthropic will provide, are needed before investors can judge what a fair long-term margin looks like.

Polymarket Bettors See a Pop, but Not $1.8 Trillion

On Polymarket’s prediction markets, bettors see an 86% chance Anthropic starts trading on Nov. 19. They also give 88% odds that the stock closes its first day above the IPO price.

However, the chance that Anthropic ends day one with a market value above $1.5 trillion stands at only 43%.

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