Anthropic Starts Marketing Shares Ahead of IPO

Claude developer Anthropic has started marketing its shares to investors ahead of a Nasdaq listing that would rank as the second largest initial public offering (IPO) on record.

The company said on Tuesday (November 10) that it plans to sell 825 million Class A shares at US$70 to US$78 each. Anthropic is offering about 801.4 million of those shares, and existing stockholders are selling the remaining 23.6 million. Anthropic expects to give underwriters a 30 day option to buy up to 123.75 million more.

At the top of the range, the base offering would raise about US$64.4 billion. CBC News reported that the range implies a fully diluted valuation of roughly US$1.3 trillion at the midpoint and US$1.4 trillion at the top end.

Citing people familiar with the matter, Bloomberg reported on Wednesday (November 11) that the deal has drawn orders for multiple times the shares on offer. CNBC said that Anthropic aims to start trading on November 19.

The company has applied to list on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker “ANT,” with Goldman Sachs (NYSE:GS) and Morgan Stanley (NYSE:MS) leading the offering.

Seven companies, including NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA), Google and Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), plan to buy another US$26 billion of stock in a concurrent private placement, according to IPO research firm Renaissance Capital.

Until now, public investors seeking AI exposure have largely relied on companies such as Microsoft and NVIDIA, which run large businesses beyond AI models.

Anthropic’s revenue reached US$17 billion in the third quarter, up from US$11.6 billion in the second quarter and US$1.4 billion a year earlier, according to an amended filing reported by Fortune.

But the company swung to a US$567 million operating loss from a US$974 million operating profit in the prior quarter, which it blamed mainly on higher-cost compute bought under short-term contracts.

The prospectus devotes 94 of its more than 300 pages to risk factors, including a warning that the company’s models could take actions that “pose catastrophic or existential risks to humanity.”

At US$64.4 billion, the offering would trail only Space Exploration Technologies' (NASDAQ:SPCX) June listing, which raised US$75 billion. SpaceX shares have since traded as much as 22 percent below their US$135 IPO price.

Founded in 2021 by former OpenAI staff, Anthropic is organized as a public benefit corporation, which requires its board to balance public safety against shareholder returns.

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Securities Disclosure: I, Giann Liguid, hold no direct investment interest in any company mentioned in this article.