Anthropic’s bankers opened the books on Tuesday with 825 million shares to sell and a price range printed at the top of an amended filing. By Wednesday, according to people familiar with the matter, orders had arrived for several times the stock on offer, much of the demand in anchor-sized indications of interest rather than small tickets.
The terms are these: 801.4 million new shares from the company and 23.6 million from existing holders, priced at $70 to $78 each. At the top of the range the sale raises $64.35 billion, and the company would be worth about $1.405 trillion on a fully diluted basis, counting options and restricted stock.
Add a separate private placement and the total climbs to roughly $90.4 billion. Seven companies have agreed to buy $26 billion of nonvoting Class N shares at the IPO price: Advanced Micro Devices, Broadcom, Google, Micron Technology, Microsoft, Nvidia and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing. Those shares carry no lockup with the underwriters.
That combination would make this the largest listing on record, ahead of SpaceX’s $86.2 billion offering in June, and the first time a standalone frontier AI laboratory has sold stock to the public. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are leading the deal. Anthropic plans to price on Nov. 18 and to begin trading on Nasdaq the next day under the symbol ANT.
The demand is easier to explain than the valuation. In the nine months through Sept. 30, Anthropic booked $33.2 billion of revenue, against about $2.5 billion a year earlier. Revenue in the third quarter alone was $16.96 billion, up 47% from the previous quarter.
That last figure deserves a second look. Sequential growth of 47% is remarkable for a company of that size, and it is also less than a third of the 144% the company reported in the second quarter. The curve is still steep. It is bending.
At $78 a share, buyers are paying roughly 20 times annualized revenue from the most recent quarter. Software companies growing at similar rates have traded near that multiple in good years. None of them carried $895.4 billion in contractual commitments, most of it for computing capacity, with $447.5 billion due before 2031 and $69.8 billion payable within a year of Sept. 30.
The price also compares with the $58.90 a common share that investors paid in the Series H round in May and June, when the company was valued at $965 billion. At the $74 midpoint the offering implies a gain of about 26%, modest for a company that has roughly tripled revenue since.
The shareholder list is the part worth studying. Five of the seven buyers in the placement are suppliers of chips or manufacturing: AMD, Broadcom, Micron, Nvidia and TSMC. Google and Microsoft are both cloud hosts and competitors in models. Money moving from chip vendors into the equity of the company that buys their chips is a circle that public investors will now be asked to price.
None of this has damped demand. People involved in the process described interest from long-only funds and from accounts that rarely take part in offerings of this size. The company is also targeting a retail allocation of about 20%, well above the 5% to 10% customary in a listing of this scale.
The pitch to those buyers will be made in public. Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s chief executive, is scheduled to appear in a livestreamed conversation with JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon on Friday, two days after the books opened and five days before pricing.
Anthropic has spent weeks preparing the market for a smaller number. Investors had discussed a valuation approaching $2 trillion earlier in the autumn; by the time the range was set, people close to the company were calling $1.5 trillion a stretch. The filing also landed in a market that has turned skeptical of AI spending, after midterm elections that produced a Democratic sweep in Congress and several state ballot measures that could slow data-center construction.
The float explains how an oversubscribed deal and a reduced valuation can appear in the same week. The 825 million shares represent roughly 6% of the post-offering share count, so a modest amount of demand moves the book several times over while leaving the long-run price to be discovered after the lockups lapse.
What the order book cannot answer is what happens in the first quarter of next year, when the company reports as a public company. Anthropic will be spending against commitments signed when capital was cheaper, selling to customers who are also its hosts and its shareholders, and answering every day to investors who can sell.
Underwriters also hold an option on 123.75 million additional shares, worth about $9.7 billion at the top of the range. If that is exercised in full, the deal grows again, and so does the supply of stock that has to find a buyer at $78 or above.
The $90.4 billion is a fact about this week. The question that matters for the next four quarters is whether revenue keeps compounding near 47% a quarter, or settles toward something an ordinary multiple can carry.
