In the autumn of 2026, Anthropic — the artificial intelligence company that has come to embody both the promise and the valuation ambitions of the AI era — quietly shifted its IPO timeline by several weeks, pushing the start of public marketing to mid-October at the earliest. The adjustment is modest in calendar terms but immense in implication: the offering could value the company at roughly $2 trillion, a figure that would test whether public markets are prepared to absorb the scale of belief that private investors have already placed in artificial intelligence. The window before November's