Anthropic, the artificial intelligence company behind the Claude chatbot, set a price range of $70 to $78 a share for its initial public offering on Tuesday, putting a possible valuation on the five-year-old company of between $1.1 trillion and $1.3 trillion when it begins trading on the Nasdaq next week.
The company plans to sell 825 million Class A shares under the ticker ANT, and could raise as much as $64 billion in what would be one of the largest listings in Wall Street history and the first initial public offering from a company built entirely around artificial intelligence. Anthropic has told investors it expects to begin trading on Nov. 19.
The range is well below the roughly $2 trillion valuation that some of Anthropic's own backers were predicting as recently as this summer, according to the Financial Times, and reflects a sharply more cautious mood toward artificial-intelligence stocks since last week's U.S. midterm elections. The Nasdaq fell sharply afterward on investor concern that a Democrat-led Congress could slow the build-out of data centers and the broader AI investment boom that has driven much of the market's gains this year.
A valuation retreat from summer's $2 trillion talk
Anthropic's own numbers show both the scale of its growth and the scale of its losses. In the six months to the end of June, revenue jumped to $16.2 billion from $1.1 billion in the same period a year earlier, as businesses rushed to buy access to its Claude models for coding, customer service and other corporate work. But the company's pre-tax loss widened just as fast, to $80.7 billion from $12.9 billion, underscoring how much capital AI labs are burning through to train and run ever-larger models and to lock up computing capacity years in advance.
Co-founded in 2021 by the siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei along with five other former OpenAI researchers, Anthropic announced its intention to go public in June, a move its larger rival OpenAI followed soon after; OpenAI's own listing is now expected early next year. If Anthropic's offering prices within its stated range, the company would still be valued well below SpaceX, which listed in June at a valuation near $1.8 trillion, suggesting investors are pricing in more uncertainty around pure AI-model businesses than around Elon Musk's rocket and satellite venture.
The listing also arrives weeks after Anthropic itself warned, in risk disclosures filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, that advanced AI systems "could, if not developed, deployed, and operated with appropriate safeguards, oversight, and security measures, pose catastrophic or existential risks to humanity, particularly if such systems were misused, replicated, weaponized, or allowed to operate with a high degree of autonomy." The disclosure echoes warnings the company's own researchers have made publicly for years, and it did little to cool investor demand, according to analysts tracking the deal.
A test case for the AI trade
It's showing that they are still sort of upbeat about the outlook as far as AI is concerned, and that obviously they think the demand is going to be there.
Fiona Cincotta, senior market analyst, City Index
Because no other major company has gone public as a pure AI lab, traders are watching Anthropic's debut as a referendum on investor appetite for the sector after a volatile few weeks. A string of incidents involving semi-autonomous AI agents acting unpredictably — at both Anthropic and OpenAI — has added to unease among some current and former employees at both companies about how quickly the technology is being deployed into the world, even as the companies themselves keep racing to raise money and ship new models.
Anthropic has told investors that its future depends largely on staying at the frontier of AI development, warning that "any failure to do so could adversely affect our business." The company's bankers are expected to finalize pricing next week, ahead of the stock's scheduled debut on the Nasdaq's new-listings calendar on Nov. 19 — a date that will arrive with Wall Street still arguing over whether the AI industry's spending has outrun its revenue, or is only getting started.
