The US stock market crashed overnight, and Anthropic's valuation plummeted to 500 billion! Engaging in ASI could result in a 20-year sentence

Source: Xinzhiyuan Report

This morning, countless people's social media feeds and groups were flooded with "plunge" and "collapse."

Everyone was spreading the news: last night, the U.S. stock market experienced an epic bloodbath.

In just 40 minutes, the market value of the S&P 500 index evaporated by $2.5 trillion!

This is one of the fastest and most brutal moments of wealth shrinkage in the history of the U.S. stock market.

Moreover, Anthropic's IPO is now in jeopardy!

Currently, Anthropic's IPO valuation has dropped from $2 trillion to $1.5 trillion, and there are even rumors that it may be further adjusted down to $1 trillion, or even the rumored $500 billion!

It's simply a "ankle chop."

Worse still, with U.S. tech stocks evaporating $2.5 trillion overnight, whether Anthropic can go public is now a question.

Epic Collapse:

U.S. Stocks Plummet Across the Board, Tech Giants Suffer "Bloodbath"

Last night on Wall Street can only be described as "brutal."

All three major U.S. stock indices suffered heavy losses------

The Nasdaq plummeted over 1,400 points, a drop of 5.52%.

The S&P 500 lost $2.9 trillion in a single day.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged 1,833.06 points, a drop of 3.44%.

The sell-off in tech stocks was like a flood breaking through a dam, and the total market value of the "seven tech giants" evaporated by over $1 trillion!

Specifically, the once-celebrated darlings fell from grace.

This morning, the storm crossed the Pacific directly, with South Korea's KOSPI opening down nearly 9%, triggering a circuit breaker and halting all trading.

The screen was filled with blood red, and chaos ensued.

Just the day before, the U.S. stock market was celebrating the midterm elections, with the Dow soaring 1,500 points; just 24 hours later, the Dow reversed and plummeted 1,833 points, erasing all gains in an instant, it was too dramatic.

NVIDIA plummeted 9.26%, evaporating over $440 billion in a single day, nearly bringing its annual gains to zero;

AMD dropped 15%, Micron fell 17%, SanDisk plunged 22%;

Qualcomm fell nearly 9.5%.

The high cost of storage chips is severely eroding profits.

The two giants of computing power leasing suffered a bloodbath: CoreWeave plummeted 10%, down 76% from last year's peak; Nebius dropped 15%, halving from this year's high, and even the energy stocks responsible for power supply, GE Vernova and Constellation Energy, faced fierce sell-offs.

Tesla, under Elon Musk, fell nearly 11%, and SpaceX dropped over 9%, as concerns about the expansion of AI training centers spread rapidly.

AI concept stocks were bombed one by one!

The direct trigger was the result of the U.S. midterm elections------the Democratic Party took both the House and Senate. What Wall Street fears most is that AI infrastructure will be "choked."

It's important to note that the reason the U.S. stock market has been hitting new highs over the past year has been due to all-in on "AI computing power chains" and "data center construction."

Once this logic is disrupted, the entire industry chain will be overturned!

Anthropic's Shocking Thunder: $895 Billion Debt Black Hole, Valuation Plummets from $2 Trillion to "Ankle Chop"

Originally, Anthropic was elevated by Wall Street, seen as the ballast for global tech stocks in 2026.

Just a few days ago, the market was still clamoring for its IPO valuation of $2 trillion.

However, the latest disclosed data has left major Wall Street investment banks stunned:

Anthropic is burdened with an irrevocable commitment to computing power and infrastructure expenditures amounting to as much as $895 billion!

What does this mean?

Among all the tech giants in the U.S., apart from Alphabet, Google's parent company, with a $1.06 trillion commitment, this bill from Anthropic directly surpasses Meta ($866 billion), crushing the entire Silicon Valley.

This means that even if the company earns not a penny tomorrow, it must still pay this exorbitant bill. Among them:

Broadcom: $161 billion;

Google: $121 billion, plus a commitment of up to $150 billion for AI chip procurement;

SpaceX: $121 billion;

Amazon: at least $110 billion.

Even more deadly is the repayment schedule.

In just the next 12 months, Anthropic must cough up a whopping $70 billion; by the end of 2030, it needs to shell out $448 billion.

Can it earn that much money?

Despite a 47% increase in revenue in the third quarter, reaching $17 billion, the bottomless pit of large model development and massive depreciation is causing its net losses to expand astronomically.

Annual revenue of several billion, debts nearing a trillion, and $70 billion due in a year.

Once the news broke, the capital market completely flipped the table.

Investment institutions collectively turned against it, frantically pressuring.

Just a few days ago, there were dreams of a $2 trillion valuation IPO, but the target valuation quickly halved to $1.5 trillion, $1 trillion, and there are even rumors of someone offering a "chop" low bid of $500 billion in private trading.

When Wall Street discovered that even the top-tier AI deity templates rely on "trillion-dollar promissory notes," everything collapsed.

Anthropic Faces a Huge Crisis

Can AI models earn back the money burned?

According to data from the prediction market platform Kalshi, the likelihood of Anthropic going public in 2026 has plummeted from nearly 90% before the midterm elections to less than 60%.

A former Morgan Stanley employee and Silicon Valley partner bluntly stated: lowering the valuation is irrelevant because this game may already be over.

He pointed out that Anthropic (and similar AI giants) exist based on a financing model of "extreme asset-liability mismatch."

This is essentially a "self-referential trap of a confidence game."

In simple terms: AI companies need to continuously purchase computing power from super-large data centers (like Amazon and Google), and to pay for it, they must constantly finance and issue new shares at extremely high valuations. This model can only be maintained when stock prices soar.

But once the IPO pricing goes wrong, or the stock market environment deteriorates, a death spiral will begin.

Without high-valued equity, they cannot borrow money; without credit, they cannot pay the computing power bills; if they cannot pay the computing power bills, the company cannot survive, because that nearly trillion-dollar irrevocable commitment is a deadly negative asset mortgage.

"If credit rating agencies do not give investment-grade bond ratings for a $2 trillion market value, they will absolutely not give a junk bond rating for $1 trillion."

In this situation, Anthropic faces an extremely severe life-and-death test to go public smoothly.

If they force a roadshow, they may encounter the embarrassment of no one showing interest; if they delay, the $70 billion bill is about to be overdue next year.

Black Swan Causes AI Infrastructure to Hit the Brakes

The result of the U.S. midterm elections has directly pulled the power switch on the global AI computing power industry chain.

The Democratic Party not only took both the House and Senate but also unexpectedly won the Texas gubernatorial election, the stronghold of AI computing power.

The newly elected governor clearly advocated during the campaign: to impose a temporary ban on high-energy-consuming data centers and to cancel various tax reductions for data center operators.

Over the past two years, global tech giants have been building factories here, with supercomputing centers from Google, Meta, Oracle, and OpenAI clustering in this area. The AI models are getting larger and consuming more and more electricity.

Now, the reckoning has come.

The market has suddenly realized: the biggest bottleneck for AI is not the algorithms, but electricity; and the biggest obstacle to electricity is policy.

Over the past year, the ability of the U.S. stock market to reach historical highs relies on the limitless investment expectations of "tech giants frantically buying chips, buying power, and building data centers." Now, those expectations have been directly halved, and the entire AI infrastructure chain is experiencing severe turmoil.

This time, the market isn't cutting "with shovels," but is specifically targeting "those selling shovels."

In the past, capital believed that as long as chips could be produced and data centers could be built, the future would definitely yield returns. Now, as the giants carry nearly a trillion-dollar bill and data center approvals are blocked by policies, Wall Street has begun to calculate the total bill:

These hundreds of billions of dollars poured into the ground, apart from beautiful PowerPoint presentations, when can we actually see real commercial returns?

The screen full of plummeting stocks is the brutal answer given by Wall Street.

Proposed Permanent Ban on "Superintelligence," Violators Face Up to 20 Years

Moreover, the U.S. may fully ban superintelligence, with violators facing up to 20 years!

Less than 24 hours after the election results were announced, Arizona Democratic Congresswoman Yassamin Ansari publicly declared war on the entire AI industry:

The number one agenda on the first day of the Democratic administration should be to pause advanced AI research and completely ban superintelligence.

This tweet quickly surpassed 14 million views, and Musk immediately retweeted it sarcastically: "What a beautiful new world."

Unexpectedly, Ansari, holding a new majority in Congress, directly confronted Musk, leaving a fiery warning: "See you soon in Congress."

Silicon Valley and Wall Street are in a complete panic because Ansari is not just shouting slogans.

The "Ban on Artificial Superintelligence Act" (Bill Number S.5493 / H.R.10538) that she co-sponsored is no longer just a proposal that stays on paper.

As early as September of this year, this bill was officially submitted to Congress by Senator Sanders and Congressman Casar.

Opening the text of this bill reveals three ironclad clauses that could uproot Silicon Valley:

The first blow superficially regulates the "future," but actually cuts into the "present."

The bill stipulates that as long as the training computing power exceeds 10²⁵ floating-point operations, it automatically triggers a "mandatory pause order"—training, fine-tuning, or even pushing to market is strictly prohibited without approval from the newly established federal "AI Department."

It should be noted that as early as three years ago, the first-generation GPT-4 had already crossed this threshold!

This means that the next-generation flagship models currently being run in major laboratories in Silicon Valley, from the moment the data center is powered on, are all stepping on the illegal red line.

The second blow completely seals the ceiling on "superintelligence."

As long as AI's cognitive ability surpasses humans in most fields or poses a risk of losing control, it will be permanently classified as a forbidden zone—cutting off the entire chain from code development, investment, to open-source deployment.

The third blow treats the development of large models as a "felony."

Once crossed, the involved tech companies will be directly ordered to dissolve by the federal government; engineers and executives could face up to 20 years of federal imprisonment!

The entire X exploded in an uproar.

Notable tech investor Jen Zhu stated, "Why not just ban linear algebra, probability statistics, and vector calculus as well!"

Wall Street traders were even more furious, criticizing politicians for "single-handedly collapsing the entire U.S. stock market with a tweet."

Macro institutions also warned that hitting the brakes now is tantamount to "self-destruction."

For the capital market, this bill directly cuts off the source of the entire demand chain for AI hardware.

If the next-generation large models cannot be trained, then there is no need for so many GPUs.

Without GPUs, there is no need for so much HBM and storage; if chips are not purchased, then building data centers is naturally unnecessary.

It should be noted that AI is the only reason the U.S. GDP can maintain positive growth.

References:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/anthropic-ipo-odds-drop-compute-commitments

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/anthropic-valuation-tumbles-pre-ipo

https://x.com/i/trending/2118481444595236976