This week, the AI stock sell-off wasn’t about “not making money”—it was about “running out of cash.” Meta increased its capital expenditures to $135–145 billion and is raising new equity; CoreWeave’s bonds have plunged into credit distress; SoftBank’s market cap has halved since its June peak. The market’s panic loop is this: AI companies are burning cash faster than ever, while funding channels are shrinking—fear is growing that they’ll run out of fuel mid-burn. Then, at this critical moment, Anthropic officially filed for an IPO (ticker: ANT), signaling to the market that the public markets’ purse is still open—that leading AI companies are bold enough to expose their finances to SEC scrutiny, and that private investors are still willing to step in. This restores confidence in funding channels and establishes a valuation anchor: fear shifts from “an unknown cash sinkhole” to “a tradable asset,” which is why the Nasdaq rose +0.82% on Monday. But let’s be cautious: filing ≠ listing. Anthropic is still massively unprofitable, and the loss figures in its S-1 could be a double-edged sword. What truly confirms the AI narrative are the upcoming earnings reports from Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and SK Hynix—private market pricing provides the anchor, but public market earnings will determine survival.