Anthropic sets $70 to $78 IPO price range, eyeing Nov. 19 Nasdaq debut

What happened

Anthropic, the company behind the Claude AI models, has put a price range on its initial public offering (IPO). Its amended filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday shows 825 million Class A shares on offer at $70 to $78 apiece, which would bring in between $57.75 billion and $64.35 billion. People familiar with the plan told CNBC the deal should be priced on Nov. 18, with shares trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker ANT the next day. The Financial Times (FT) reported that the listing targets a valuation of as much as $1.4 trillion.

What it means

The range is the first hard number in a deal that has been the subject of months of speculation. On a fully diluted basis, which counts options and other rights that could turn into shares, the top of the range would value Anthropic at about $1.4 trillion, according to CNBC and TechCrunch. That is well above the $965 billion valuation from its May funding round, but short of the $2 trillion the company was reportedly aiming for a few months ago. Using only the roughly 13.09 billion shares expected to be outstanding after the sale, Yahoo Finance calculated a market value of about $916 billion to $1.02 trillion.

The deal also leans heavily on the companies that supply Anthropic's computing power. Seven of them, including Google, Nvidia, AMD, Broadcom, Micron, Microsoft and TSMC, have agreed to buy $26 billion of non-voting Class N stock at the IPO price in a private placement, a sale arranged directly rather than on the open market. Google and Nvidia are putting in about $10 billion each. Those shares will not face the usual lock-up, the period after a listing when insiders cannot sell.

Ordinary investors may get an unusually large slice. CNBC's sources said Anthropic is targeting about 20% of the offering for retail buyers, compared with a typical 5% to 10%. They also said institutional orders already cover the range. Control, however, stays tightly held: as a public benefit corporation, its founders hold a class of shares carrying 50.1% of the votes, TechCrunch noted, and a separate trust elects a board majority.

The numbers behind the pitch are large on both sides. The filing shows nine-month revenue of $33.2 billion, up from $2.5 billion a year earlier, and run-rate revenue (current monthly sales scaled to a full year) of roughly $81 billion at the end of October. It also shows a $104 billion net loss for the period, mostly from a non-cash charge tied to convertible notes, and about $900.9 billion of spending commitments, mostly on compute and infrastructure. Looking further ahead, the FT reported that Goldman Sachs, one of the underwriters on the deal, expects Anthropic's revenue to top $600 billion by 2030.

The bull case

Growth is extraordinary: revenue for the first nine months of 2026 was more than 13 times its level a year earlier, and run-rate sales rose by about $10 billion in a single month. Big-name suppliers are committing $26 billion at the IPO price, and CNBC's sources say institutional demand already covers the range. A smooth debut could ease the recent gloom around AI stocks.

The bear case

The company is still deeply loss-making on a net basis and carries roughly $900 billion of spending commitments. CNBC noted that markets have grown wary of the AI trade as higher interest rates make borrowing for infrastructure costlier, and some investors had called even $1.5 trillion a stretch. Supplier shares free of lock-up could add selling pressure later, and Class A buyers get limited say in how the company is run.