Abstract:
Anthropic PBC seeks to achieve a fully diluted valuation of approximately $1.4 trillion in an initial public offering (IPO), striving to become the first cutting-edge artificial intelligence laboratory to go public. The Claude chatbot developer and its co-founders seek to raise up to $90.4 billion through an IPO and private placement.
According to documents submitted to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday, the underlying offering intends to raise up to $64.4 billion, with the stock offering price ranging from $70 to $78 per share. Anthropic will issue 801.4 million shares and its investors will sell 23.6 million shares.
Documents show that the issuance also includes a private placement that will raise a total of $26 billion, including AMD, Broadcom, Alphabet's Google, Micron Technology, Microsoft, Nvidia and TSMC.
Based on the outstanding shares listed in the filing, Anthropic’s market capitalization would be approximately $1 trillion if the offering price were set at the upper end of the range. When including employee stock options, letter stock and shares set aside for the company's charitable giving matching program, Anthropic's fully diluted valuation will be approximately $1.4 trillion.
If Anthropic's planned IPO is included in the private placement, the issuance size will exceed SpaceX's US$75 billion basic issuance, becoming the largest listing transaction in history. However, Anthropic’s potential $1.4 trillion valuation is still lower than when Musk’s companies went public. SpaceX's market capitalization at the time the offering price was determined was $1.77 trillion.
According to calculations, Anthropic's ambitious financing goal, including private placements and the so-called over-allotment option, will reach approximately US$100 billion.
According to people familiar with the matter, the IPO was fully subscribed when bookkeeping started, and subscriptions from potential investors have covered all shares available for issuance.
Industry research analyst Mandeep Singh wrote, "If Anthropic's annual recurring revenue (ARR) reaches at least US$150 billion by 2027, then a market value of US$1.4 trillion may be reasonable. The company reported ARR of US$81 billion in October, and will need to add at least US$5 billion in ARR every month thereafter as support."
Anthropic set this target despite market jitters caused by a sharp sell-off in AI-related stocks last week. The sell-off in AI stocks was triggered by market expectations that politicians advocating tighter regulation of data centers and related infrastructure would drive up costs and control the development of the technology.
Investors are facing a difficult judgment: whether current valuations in the AI field reflect reasonable prospects for a technology that many believe will reshape the economy and society as a whole, or whether they reflect over-optimism in an investment thesis that has yet to prove its durability.
William Blair analyst Arjun Bhatia wrote, "At a $1.5 trillion valuation, Anthropic is valued at about 11 times our 2027 revenue forecast and only 7 times our 2028 revenue forecast. This is an attractive valuation multiple for a once-in-a-generation company like Anthropic, which is facing a technological change that will only occur once in a few decades at best."
Anthropic has submitted IPO application documents to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. For the first time, the public got a glimpse into the artificial intelligence company's financial health, not only seeing how much money it made but also how much it might be losing.
Claude Code and similar tools from its competitors have been widely adopted by software developers, demonstrating the potential for artificial intelligence to transform a wide range of professional fields, from discovering new breakthrough drugs to dealing with complex legal and accounting rules to factory operations. Documents show that more than 90% of the current code contributions in the Anthropic code base are written by Claude.
Anthropic has launched so-called vertical solutions in these areas, with a particular focus on healthcare and life sciences. Novartis CEO Vas Narasimhan also sits on Anthropic's board of directors.
Documents show that Anthropic’s seven co-founders, including CEO Dario Amodei, will each sell 3.38 million shares in the IPO.
Anthropic’s IPO is scheduled to price on Wednesday, November 18, and begin trading the next day, according to transaction documents seen.
Previously reported that the company plans to hold a livestream event on Friday, where Amodei will discuss the IPO of the Claude chatbot developer with JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon.
Anthropic's sales are rising. Documents show that as of October 31, the company’s annualized revenue was US$81 billion, an increase of US$10 billion from the end of September. Previous reports stated that Anthropic’s annualized revenue as of the end of July was US$65 billion. Anthropic defines this metric as: the past 28 days of usage-based revenue and single-month subscription charges, converted to an adult level.
In their model, Goldman Sachs research analysts expect Anthropic's revenue to surge to about $685 billion by the end of the decade.
Documents show that as of September 30, the company’s third-quarter revenue was nearly $17 billion, compared with $1.4 billion in the same period a year earlier. Anthropic on Monday released new versions of its powerful Mythos and Fable models, both of which are faster than previous versions, with Fable also being cheaper. Currently, some companies are cutting back on spending on the technology.
To maintain such a rapid pace of development, Anthropic needs to grow revenue faster than its AI infrastructure spending. The latest filings show that Anthropic’s committed spending has increased to nearly $901 billion, most of which is spent on computing power and chips. About $71 billion in committed spending is due in the year to September 2027 alone — a figure that is greater than the respective market capitalizations of about two-thirds of the S&P 500 stocks.
Unlike other technology companies, Anthropic has no other revenue streams to back it up, such as advertising, so it must convince investors that focusing on artificial intelligence alone can create profits that far exceed the soaring costs of the technology. SpaceX may have linked its development vision to AI when pitching its IPO to investors, but at the time most of its actual revenue came from other businesses.
However, this has not stopped asset managers, venture capital institutions and some of the world's largest technology companies from investing tens of billions of dollars in Anthropic. Before the IPO, several funds from investment institutions such as Fidelity Investments, Capital Group and BlackRock, as well as venture capital institutions such as Iconiq, Spark Capital and Sequoia Capital, held shares in Anthropic. Alphabet's Google, Amazon and Microsoft are also investors in Anthropic, and are also its customers and important computing power suppliers.
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