Anthropic's Record Listing Draws Six Times the Orders as Investors Chase the Biggest IPO Ever

Anthropic's initial public offering has drawn about six times the orders for the shares on offer, according to people familiar with the matter, setting up what would be the biggest first-time share sale in history. The maker of the Claude artificial intelligence models is seeking to raise as much as $64.4 billion in the listing, plus a further $26 billion in a concurrent private placement — a combined $90.4 billion that would eclipse SpaceX's debut earlier this year. The shares are expected to be priced at between $70 and $78 each, valuing the company at about $1.4 trillion on a fully diluted basis.

The scale of the demand is a measure of how far Anthropic has travelled in a year. Regulatory filings show the company reached an annualised revenue run rate of $81 billion at the end of October, up $10 billion from the end of September and from $65 billion at the end of July — growth driven by Claude's adoption among businesses building AI agents and coding tools. The company said on Thursday that it expects to set the final IPO price on Wednesday 18 November, with trading starting the following day on the Nasdaq under the ticker ANT. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are leading the offering, with twenty other banks taking part.

Not everyone who wants in will get the allocation they asked for. Bankers have told prospective investors that existing backers will be given priority, and that some would-be buyers will receive smaller stakes than they requested — a familiar consequence of an order book several times oversubscribed. There were also reports that the offering would place curbs on investors from China and Hong Kong, a sign of how closely Washington now watches who owns the companies building frontier AI. The terms, including the size of the demand, could still change before pricing.

The listing is also a test of whether the market's appetite for AI can survive its own nerves. The Nasdaq fell 5.5 per cent in the week before Anthropic set its price range, erasing about $2.5 trillion of market value as AI stocks sold off, and the week's turmoil at Nvidia — where the founder's resignation wiped hundreds of billions of dollars from the world's most valuable company — has reminded investors how quickly sentiment can turn. Anthropic's own pitch is that its growth is real and accelerating: its filings show revenue compounding at a pace few companies of its size have ever sustained, and its chief executive, Dario Amodei, appeared alongside JPMorgan's Jamie Dimon in a livestream for prospective investors on Friday.

The numbers behind the deal are striking even by the standards of a market used to superlatives. At the top of the range, the $64.4 billion public raise alone would be the largest ever, and the $1.4 trillion valuation would place a five-year-old company — founded in 2021 by former OpenAI researchers — among the most valuable in the world on its first day of trading. The company's own disclosures note that Claude wrote more than 90 per cent of the contributions to Anthropic's codebase in September, a detail investors have seized on as both a sign of the technology's power and a question about what it means for the company's own workforce.

Online, the mood is split between enthusiasm and doubt. On Polymarket, traders priced the chance of the listing going ahead at 99 per cent, and the chance of the shares closing above the IPO price at 88 per cent — but on Hacker News, some of the most-read comments questioned whether customers loyal to Claude today would stay if cheaper models catch up, and whether the lock-up schedule in the filing would weigh on the shares once insiders can sell. What happens next is a matter of days: pricing on 18 November will show whether the sixfold demand holds at the top of the range, and the first trades on 19 November will show whether the biggest listing in history can also be a durable one.