Anthropic IPO: Shares of the AI developer now accessible ahead of Nasdaq debut

Freedom has opened pre-IPO access to Anthropic shares for clients starting Thursday, November 12, ahead of the most anticipated listing of the year since Elon Musk’s SpaceX went public in June. Anthropic is set to debut on the Nasdaq on November 19 under the ticker symbol ANT.

Anthropic’s IPO is expected to price on November 18. The company set a range of $70-78 per share, aiming to raise more than $60 billion in the public offering and another $26 billion in a private placement with investors including Google, Nvidia, and Microsoft. At the top of the range, the AI giant would be valued at about $1.4 trillion on a fully diluted basis.

The final price and valuation could be considerably higher. Bankers expect to price the offering above the top of the range after seeing strong investor demand, the Financial Times reports. Morningstar puts Anthropic’s fair value at $1.7 trillion, while traders in off-exchange markets are already dealing in futures at $98 per share, betting on a sharp rise in the stock.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei cofounded the company in 2021 with a group of researchers who left OpenAI, now its chief rival, CNBC reports. Its flagship product is Claude, a family of large language models that includes Opus, Sonnet, and Haiku, each designed for tasks of varying complexity. Anthropic builds AI assistants on top of those models, including Claude Code for programming and Claude Cowork for automating workflows, analyzing information, and carrying out multistep tasks.

Anthropic serves primarily business customers and makes money through subscriptions, software products, and access to its models through an API.

Anthropic’s revenue jumped about 1,200% year over year to $33.24 billion in the nine months ended September 30, according to its prospectus. The net loss widened more than 314% to $104 billion over the same period. Most of that was a paper loss stemming from changes in the fair value of convertible notes and derivative liabilities, CNBC reports. Anthropic has committed to spending almost $900 billion on computing capacity from its partners.

Anthropic stated that its run-rate revenue reached $81 billion at the end of October, up $10 billion in a month. Goldman Sachs analysts project that Anthropic’s revenue will soar to about $685 billion by the end of the decade.

In the prospectus, Anthropic also acknowledged that competitors could develop models faster and that advanced AI systems without adequate safeguards may “pose catastrophic or existential risks to humanity.”

Amodei publicly called for slowing the AI race in September, citing safety risks. On Monday, Anthropic unveiled new versions of its powerful Mythos and Fable models. Both are faster than their predecessors. Anthropic stressed that the models underwent rigorous safety and alignment testing and that its developers prepared new evaluations and post-launch monitoring tools for the release.

“Our aim is to help humankind chart a safe course through this technological evolution, open new frontiers of discovery, and bring forth an age of miracles,” Anthropic’s cofounders wrote in the prospectus. “Everyone who owns our stock, whether an institution or an individual, becomes part of that effort. We hope you will share our ambition to see it through.”

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

“Anthropic really represents the first AI pure-play business in the public markets,” Matt Witheiler, head of late-stage growth at Wellington Management, was quoted as saying by Bloomberg. “You have AI enablers but you don’t have a native AI company until now.”

Enthusiasm for the listing is far from universal. Jack Selby, who runs venture capital firm Copper Sky and is a managing partner at Peter Thiel’s family office, sees the IPO as a potential catalyst for a sector-wide correction. A longtime skeptic of the AI rally who has called it the biggest bubble in private tech investing, Selby warns that the stock could come under heavy pressure when the lockup period ends and early investors and insiders are free to sell their shares on the open market, Bloomberg notes.

“An underperforming Anthropic IPO has to be a very prominent player in what will be a pretty massive correction in the market with respect to AI,” Selby told Bloomberg Television. “If the most anticipated AI company’s IPO falls very short of its projected valuation, and just imagine where it’s going to go after the lockups expire.” 

Investors are also watching Anthropic’s IPO for clues about the prospects for OpenAI. The chief rival in the chatbot market is looking to close a $30 billion funding round ahead of its own potential listing, Reuters reports.

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Freedom clients can access Anthropic shares before the start of the main U.S. session. Premarket trading will open 2-3 hours early, at 15:30-16:30 Astana time. To start trading, select the symbol ANT.US on the Freedom trading platform.