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Anthropic PBC is seeking a fully diluted valuation of about $1.4 trillion in its initial public offering, in a bid to make history as the first frontier artificial intelligence lab to go public.
The Claude chatbot maker and some of its backers are seeking to raise as much as $90.4 billion in the IPO and a private placement. The base offering would raise up to $64.4 billion, with shares marketed for $70 to $78 each, according to a filing on Tuesday with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Anthropic is offering 801.4 million shares, while backers are selling 23.6 million shares.
The figure also includes a private placement set to raise $26 billion in aggregate, to Advanced Micro Devices Inc., Broadcom Inc., Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Micron Technology Inc., Microsoft Corp., Nvidia Corp. and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., the filing shows.
At the top of the price range, Anthropic would have a market value of about $1 trillion, based on the shares outstanding listed in the filing. Accounting for employee stock options, restricted shares and stock reserved for the company’s charitable donation matching program, Anthropic would have a fully diluted value of about $1.4 trillion.
Anthropic’s ambitious target, including the private placement, would hit roughly $100 billion when including a so-called over-allotment option or greenshoe, Bloomberg News calculations show. That would top SpaceX’s $75 billion base offering, or the $86.2 billion it raised with the greenshoe.
The goal defies jitters from a sharp selloff in AI-related stocks last week, driven by expectations that politicians promising tougher regulation of data centers and related infrastructure will drive up costs and limit development of the technology.
Investors are under pressure to decide whether valuations in AI reflect a plausible trajectory for a technology that many expect to transform the economy and society as a whole, or overconfidence in an investment theme that hasn’t yet proven its staying power.
The widespread adoption of Claude Code and rival tools by software developers points to the potential transformation of a wide range of professional activity, from discovering new miracle drugs to navigating complex legal and accounting rules to running a factory. Already, more than 90% of contributions to Anthropic’s code base were written by Claude, the filing shows.
Anthropic has introduced so-called vertical solutions in these areas, with particular emphasis on healthcare and life sciences. It counts Novartis AG Chief Executive Officer Vas Narasimhan as one of its board members.
The IPO is set to price on Wednesday, Nov. 18, according to terms of the deal reviewed by Bloomberg.
Sales are surging. The company reported third-quarter revenue of nearly $17 billion as of Sept. 30, versus $1.4 billion in the same period a year ago, its filing shows. On Monday Anthropic unveiled new versions of its powerful Mythos and Fable models, both of which are faster than prior versions, while Fable is less expensive, as some companies cut back on their spending on the technology.
Keeping the pace of development running at a breakneck pace will require growing revenue faster than Anthropic’s spending on AI infrastructure. Anthropic has $895 billion of commitments, most of which are for computing power, chips, the filing shows. About $70 billion worth — a figure that’s larger than the individual market caps of roughly two-thirds of S&P 500 companies — are due just in the year through September 2027.
Unlike other tech companies with sources of income such as advertising to fall back on, Anthropic will have to convince investors that its focus on AI alone will generate profit far beyond the technology’s surging costs. SpaceX may have tied its aspirations to AI when it pitched investors on its IPO, but most of its actual revenue at the time came from its other business lines.
That hasn’t stopped asset managers, venture capital firms and some of the biggest tech companies from backing Anthropic to the tune of tens of billions of dollars. Funds scattered across investment houses including Fidelity Investments, Capital Group and BlackRock Inc. and VCs such as Iconiq, Spark Capital and Sequoia Capital hold Anthropic shares before the IPO. Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Amazon.com Inc. and Microsoft Corp. are backers as well as customers and key suppliers of computing power.
Pace the Frontier
The speed of development has become increasingly controversial, with Anthropic’s own Chief Executive Officer Dario Amodei among those calling for top AI labs to “pace the frontier” in order to prioritize safety. Anthropic itself warned that the technology could pose “catastrophic or existential risks to humanity” in its IPO filing, if the technology isn’t developed with adequate safeguards and oversight.
Regulators, investors and even Anthropic’s employees have flagged the significant risk of humans losing control of the technology, with one putting the chance of AI eliminating all humans in the next decade at greater than 10%. Bill Gates said AI is powerful enough to drive events that cause “a billion deaths.”
Anthropic’s rival OpenAI is targeting a 2027 listing and Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman called 2026 an “ill-advised moment” for an IPO, citing concern over AI safety. The company is raising funds at a $1.25 trillion valuation, people familiar with the matter have said.
Anthropic’s origin story centers around former OpenAI executives defecting because they wanted to prioritize AI safety. Nearly six years after its founding, Anthropic has structured itself as a public benefit corporation that balances shareholder interests with those of society, and whose governance includes a Long-Term Benefit Trust that has the power to elect and remove a majority of the members of the company’s board.
Anthropic’s seven co-founders hold roughly 1.4% stakes in the company, making them each billionaires several times over. That remains true even if they stick to their pledges to give 80% of their personal equity in the company to philanthropic causes.
The company’s total operating expenses jumped to $17.5 billion in the third quarter, a 292% increase from a year prior. It flipped from an operating profit of $974 million in the second quarter — its first after at least five quarters of operating losses — back to a negative $567 million in the three months ended Sept. 30, according to the filing.
The operating loss in the third quarter was primarily driven by $5 billion of computing costs under short-term commitments and $2 billion of non-cash charges related to the company’s charitable donation-matching program.
AI pricing pressures have begun to hit Anthropic’s revenue. Lower prices on some of its new models, plus contractual discounts for some customers, reduced its revenue growth in the third quarter by about $600 million, the filing shows.
Anthropic has cut prices in newer model rollouts, including Opus 5.5 in September, and OpenAI has also introduced lower-priced models in recent months. The AI giants face growing competition from cheaper open-weight models, including from Chinese developers, which customers can download and fine-tune to their needs.
Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Morgan Stanley are leading Anthropic’s IPO, with participation from 20 other banks, the filing shows. The stock is expected to trade on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the symbol ANT.
