Artificial intelligence lab sets 70 to 78 dollar price range for 825 million shares as historic listing nears

Anthropic, the developer of Claude, has set a price range of 70 to 78 dollars a share for its initial public offering, saying in an updated filing on Tuesday that it will offer 825 million shares in what could become a historic stock market debut. The company plans to price the offering on November 18 and begin trading on November 19 on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol ANT, according to people familiar with the details. It is targeting a retail allocation of about 20 percent, far higher than the 5 to 10 percent typical for initial public offerings.

At the top of the range, the company would raise up to 64.35 billion dollars through the public offering itself. On top of that, it has agreed to sell a further 26 billion dollars of its shares in a private placement to Advanced Micro Devices, Broadcom, Google, Micron, Microsoft, Nvidia and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., at a price per share equal to the IPO price; Nvidia has agreed to buy about 10 billion dollars of shares. The privately placed shares will not be registered in the offering and will not be subject to underwriter lock-up agreements. Together, the public offering and the private placement would exceed the record 85.7 billion dollar listing of SpaceX five months ago, which would make the combined deals the largest listing of all time, though the public offering alone would rank below that record.

Valuation: 1.405 trillion dollars fully diluted

At the high end of the range, the company could be worth up to 1.405 trillion dollars on a fully diluted basis, which counts all potential shares including options and convertible instruments, up from the 965 billion dollar valuation it announced in a May funding round. A separate market preview cited an estimated valuation of about 1.2 trillion dollars. The reports do not establish a common basis for that figure and the filing-based fully diluted valuation, so they should not be treated as directly interchangeable. Even so, the target is well below the 2 trillion dollar valuation the company had been looking toward until recently, and some of its own investors have said that even 1.5 trillion dollars now looks like a stretch.

Demand runs at six times the shares on offer

Investor appetite has been intense. The order book was already covered at the 70 to 78 dollar range on an allocable basis when the range was set, and by Thursday orders had reached about six times the shares on offer, according to people familiar with the process, who cautioned that the details, including the level of demand, could still change. Bankers have warned prospective investors that the company will prioritise existing backers, so some buyers will receive smaller allocations than they expected. Demand from institutions is said to be even stronger than it was for SpaceX's offering at the same point in that process.

A hard political and market backdrop

Executives pitching the offering face a tumultuous political environment after last week's midterm elections, which brought a Democratic sweep in Congress and numerous statewide ballot measures that could slow the construction of artificial intelligence infrastructure. They are also pitching to a public market that has grown increasingly skeptical of artificial intelligence investments, on concern that rising interest rates will make debt unaffordable for companies that need it for costly infrastructure purchases. Some shareholders had been bracing for a lower valuation than previously expected.

Finances: explosive growth, heavy accounting losses

The filing shows explosive growth alongside heavy losses. For the nine months ended September 30, the company generated 33.24 billion dollars in revenue, up roughly 1,200 percent from the same period last year, when it lost 25.1 billion dollars; this year's nine-month net loss was 104 billion dollars, though most of that reflected changes in the fair value of convertible notes and derivative liabilities rather than operations. Its revenue run rate reached roughly 81 billion dollars at the end of October, up 10 billion dollars from the end of September and from 65 billion dollars at the end of July, a metric the company calculates by annualising consumption-based fees for a trailing 28-day period plus subscription fees for a single month. The five-year-old company, founded in 2021 by Dario Amodei and researchers who left OpenAI, is best known for its Claude family of artificial intelligence models and sells mainly to other businesses; on Monday it released Claude Fable 5.2 and Claude Mythos 5.2, its first since its chief executive called in September for a slower pace of development, saying they underwent rigorous safety and alignment testing. The offering is led by Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley with 20 others participating. Anthropic also said it developed new evaluations and post-launch monitoring tools ahead of the model releases.

In the prospectus, the company's co-founders wrote that their aim is to help humankind chart a safe course through this technological evolution and bring forth what they called an age of miracles, adding that everyone who owns the stock, whether an institution or an individual, becomes part of that effort.