Anthropic Puts a $1.4 Trillion Price on Its IPO as Wall Street Tests the AI Boom

Anthropic, the company behind the Claude chatbot, has launched the roadshow for its initial public offering with a price range that would value it at up to $1.4 trillion, setting up the most closely watched test yet of Wall Street's faith in the artificial intelligence boom. In an updated prospectus filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday, the company said it would sell 825 million Class A shares at $70 to $78 each, raising up to $64.35 billion, and list on the Nasdaq under the ticker ANT, with trading expected to begin on 19 November. The offering is the largest the AI industry has ever put in front of public investors, and it arrives at a moment when enthusiasm for AI stocks has begun to cool.

The headline numbers come with an important qualification: the $1.4 trillion figure is a fully diluted valuation, counting stock options and unvested awards that have not yet become shares. On a non-diluted basis, using only the shares that will be outstanding after the offering, the company would be worth about $1 trillion at the top of the range. Of the 825 million shares on offer, Anthropic itself is selling about 801.4 million, while existing shareholders are selling about 23.6 million and keeping the proceeds. Alongside the listing, seven of the biggest names in chips and cloud computing — Google, Nvidia, AMD, Broadcom, Micron, Microsoft and TSMC Partners — have agreed to buy a further $26 billion of stock at the IPO price in a concurrent private placement, with Google and Nvidia each investing $10 billion, taking the total capital raised to as much as $90.4 billion.

The filing also offers the clearest picture yet of the scale of Anthropic's business. Run-rate revenue reached roughly $81 billion by the end of October, about $10 billion higher than at the end of September, and revenue for the three months to 30 September was $17 billion. That is a sharp rise from the $965 billion valuation of its last private funding round in May, but it is still below the $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion figures investors were discussing only a few months ago. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are leading the syndicate, and CNBC reports that up to a fifth of the offering will be allocated to retail investors.

The roadshow began only after a false start. Late on Monday, preliminary terms were briefly circulated to investment banks showing a larger offering — about 867 million shares at $70 to $80, which could have raised as much as $69.3 billion — before being withdrawn, with the company saying some of the pricing information was inaccurate. Tuesday's filed version trimmed both levers: about 42 million fewer shares and a top price $2 lower, or roughly $5 billion less at the top of the range. The episode is a reminder that the numbers are still estimates: the registration has not yet become effective, no shares can be sold until the SEC declares it so, and the price range can still move.

For Wall Street, the listing is a referendum on the AI trade itself. Anthropic will become one of the few major companies to go public this autumn as higher borrowing costs, geopolitical turmoil and elevated bond yields weigh on the IPO market, and it follows Elon Musk's SpaceX, which raised $75 billion at a nearly $1.75 trillion valuation in June. "By seeking a valuation close to 20% below 'market expectations', this allows investors to 'bid up' the IPO rather than facing a take-it-or-leave-it scenario like SpaceX took," Jeff Zell, senior research analyst at IPO Boutique, told Reuters. The sceptics point to the costs behind the growth: the filing discloses nearly $900 billion in computing commitments with partners including Amazon and Google's parent Alphabet, and its own risk factors warn that advances in AI could outpace its safety measures and that its models may behave in unintended or autonomous ways.

What happens next is a fortnight of selling. Pricing is expected on 18 November, with the first trade the following day, and the order book will show whether the world's largest AI offering can command a premium or must settle for the bottom of its range. Either way, the listing will set the benchmark for the sector: OpenAI recently secured $11 billion at a $1.25 trillion valuation, below its initial $1.5 trillion target, Reuters reported, and every AI company watching Anthropic will read its debut as a verdict on how much more the market is willing to pay for the technology that has defined the decade. Online, the scepticism runs deep: a much-discussed r/stocks thread poring over the S-1 warned that the filing was "far more scarier than people let on", and a Hacker News discussion of a Wall Street Journal report on investor doubts about a $1.5 trillion valuation drew more than 100 comments questioning whether the company's huge compute commitments could be sustained if revenue growth slowed.