Anthropic is poised for a significant stock market entry, characterized by an impressive valuation, substantial expenditures, cautionary notes, considerable uncertainty for investors, and a strong potential gauge of the future of the fluctuating artificial intelligence sector by 2027.
In a revised filing with U.S. regulators on Tuesday, the San Francisco-based company announced an anticipated price range for its initial public offering (IPO) of $70 US to $78 US per share. This indicates a fully diluted market valuation of approximately $1.3 trillion US at the midpoint, reaching $1.4 trillion US at the highest point, making it the largest debut for a technology stock in history.
Greg Taylor, a portfolio manager at PenderFund Capital Management in Vancouver, remarked, “It’s going to be one of the biggest IPOs in history.”
The scale of an IPO is commonly assessed by the capital it generates. Anthropic is targeting to raise as much as $64.4 billion US through its public share offering. Should it succeed, it will follow only SpaceX’s record-breaking stock market opening in June.
The company is anticipated to commence trading on the Nasdaq exchange next week, with a listing notice indicating its launch for November 19. Nevertheless, a precise date has yet to be confirmed in its filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
Ernest Wong, head of research at Baskin Wealth Management in Toronto, expects the stock to be a formidable player when it starts trading on Nasdaq.
He stated, “There are only a handful of stocks globally valued over $1 trillion US. This underscores the enormity of AI.”
Following Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s admission of an affair with an alleged Chinese spy, governance questions arise regarding the company and its implications for the future of AI.
What is Anthropic?
Founded as a specialized AI research lab in 2021, Anthropic was established by its founders who departed from OpenAI, feeling that it was overly profit-driven, neglecting risks, and granting excessive influence to investors.
The company gained traction in 2024 with the launch of Claude 3.5 Sonnet, which outperformed OpenAI’s GPT-4o on key performance metrics while being significantly more cost-effective than previous leading AI models.
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FRONT BURNER
Will Anthropic’s IPO go boom or bust?
In contrast to traditional profit-driven corporations like Apple or Microsoft, Anthropic operates as a public benefit corporation, which requires its board to legally address the balance between public safety and shareholder profits.
Currently, Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei advocates strongly for AI safety, urging the sector to decelerate its progress to allow safety protocols to catch up.
In its latest filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Anthropic dedicated 94 out of over 300 pages to outlining a comprehensive list of risk factors.
The company noted, “Our AI models could act in unforeseen, misaligned, or autonomous manners, which may include taking harmful actions without any user or third-party instruction.”
Anthropic warns that this could extend to “actions resembling blackmail or attempts to sway human decision-makers to ensure the model’s continued function,” as well as behaviors that “could pose catastrophic or existential threats to humanity.”
Big numbers
The $1.4 trillion US valuation is not the only striking figure linked to Anthropic’s IPO.
The company’s valuation has seen wild fluctuations recently, with $2 trillion US being discussed. In late May, private investors appraised the firm at $965 billion US, a jump from $380 billion US just in February.
“There seems to be a significant amount of optimism embedded in these valuations as they’re emerging,” Taylor mentioned.
“It’s uncertain what Anthropic will look like five years down the line.”
Dario Amodei, CEO and co-founder of Anthropic, speaks at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January 2025. (Markus Schreiber/The Associated Press)
Sales for the company have surged. Regulatory documents indicate that Anthropic earned more than three and a half times its revenue in the first half of 2026 compared to the total revenue from the previous year. Approximately 20 percent of these earnings came from two significant unnamed clients.
However, the AI giant is also facing substantial losses. It reported a net loss of $80.7 billion US for this year up until June, largely due to non-cash accounting expenses. The company experienced a $42 billion US loss in 2025.
Anthropic also has ambitious spending strategies. The firm does not own or construct physical data centers; instead, it leases high-performance computing resources from cloud service providers like Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud through extensive multi-year contracts.
As per regulatory disclosures, Anthropic has secured nearly $900 billion US in cloud and computing agreements extending into the 2030s and 2040s. Its partners in these arrangements include Broadcom, SpaceX AI, Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft Azure.
A blockbuster IPO
The significance of Anthropic’s IPO lies not only in its vast scale.
“Investing in the Anthropic IPO represents one of the first pure AI investment opportunities available,” Taylor stated.
Until now, investors seeking to capitalize on the artificial intelligence surge have primarily been limited to less AI-centric technology firms such as Microsoft or Nvidia, which specializes in chip manufacturing. Although Google is often associated with AI investments, it also operates extensive non-AI-related businesses, including its Android smartphones and YouTube.
Wong remarked, “Their sole focus is the creation of new AI models.” “This fills a crucial gap, as we have public company data from various tech entities involved in AI, except for the model creators, primarily Anthropic and OpenAI.”
Should Anthropic’s IPO be seen as a new standard for AI investments, its initial trading days will unfold amidst considerable volatility in the tech sector.
Earlier this month, technology and AI stocks faced sharp declines followed by quick recoveries as the markets entered a correction phase. This was partly driven by worries regarding AI firms aligning their considerable expenditures with adequate profits. The political climate in the U.S. post-midterms also raised concerns about tighter regulations regarding AI and data centers.
Moreover, the recent scandal involving Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s alleged connection to a suspected Chinese spy has added another layer of complexity to AI investment apprehensions. Nvidia’s stock, viewed as a bellwether for the AI sector, has lost billions in market value in recent days on the Nasdaq, where Anthropic is preparing to launch.
Like the dot com bubble?
Wong noted, “The primary challenge for Anthropic is that they must compete with other model developers in a highly competitive landscape. OpenAI creates its own models, and SpaceX, through Grok, is a leading model laboratory. Certainly, Google and Meta are also contenders in this field.”
He anticipates that the stock will be tumultuous initially, as investors compare each new Anthropic product against its competitors and scrutinize its substantial spending on data services.
“It will be quite volatile,” Wong added.
Similar trends have been observed with SpaceX since its Nasdaq launch in June. The stock surged by around 19 percent on its first day but has since fallen as much as 22 percent below its $135 US IPO price.
For Taylor, the extensive expenditures in the AI sector, rapid stock increases, and intricate business relationships among a few tech giants serve as reminders of a past investment craze that distinctly separated triumphs from failures.
He remarked, “The dot-com bubble is certainly one that many remember vividly.” “Everyone sought a stake in the internet back in 2000.”
While companies like Pets.com failed, Google and Microsoft emerged as key players.
“There are numerous significant parallels with AI,” Taylor concluded. “The challenge lies in determining who will ultimately prevail.”
