Anthropic’s IPO seeks up to $64.4B at a $1.4 trillion valuation

Anthropic has set the terms for the most closely watched listing of the AI era. The Claude maker and some existing shareholders will sell 825 million shares at $70 to $78 each, raising up to $64.4B, with trading due to start on the Nasdaq on November 19 under the ticker ANT.

At the top of the range, the updated prospectus filed on Tuesday values Anthropic at about $1.4 trillion on a fully diluted basis, as Reuters first reported. Excluding stock options and restricted shares, the figure is closer to $1 trillion.

A separate $26B private placement with cornerstone investors lifts the total raise to as much as $90.4B. Google, Nvidia, and AMD lead that group, joined by Broadcom, Micron, Microsoft, and TSMC; Reuters separately reported that TSMC will invest up to $1B across Anthropic and OpenAI.

The numbers underneath are the sales pitch. Run-rate revenue reached roughly $81B as of October 31, up $10B in a single month, according to the filing, which also discloses nearly $900B in computing commitments with partners including Amazon and Google.

The price is nonetheless a climbdown. Guidance to investors has slid from close to $2 trillion six weeks ago, and preliminary terms pointing to a $69.3B raise circulated briefly to banks on Monday night before being retracted, according to emails seen by Reuters.

Jeff Zell of IPO Boutique told the agency that asking below expectations “allows investors to ‘bid up’ the IPO”.

Not everyone sees room left to bid.

“Anthropic could become an exceptionally successful company, but at this valuation, much of that success is already reflected in the price,” Varun Datta, founder of Truth Ventures, told Reuters.

The listing follows SpaceX’s $75B offering at a $1.75 trillion valuation in its June IPO, and caps a run that began when Anthropic filed confidentially in June at a $965B private valuation. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are leading the offering, and board members and related entities are set to buy up to $303 million of shares.

Rival OpenAI, which is raising $30B in what is expected to be its last private round before its own IPO early next year, will be watching the order book as closely as anyone.

The prospectus itself swings between registers, promising to “bring forth an age of miracles” while warning that AI’s advance could outpace Anthropic’s own safety measures. Six weeks of sliding guidance suggest investors have stopped pricing in miracles; November 19 will show what they pay for one.