Anthropic is preparing to begin marketing its initial public offering as soon as this week, according to people familiar with the matter cited by Reuters, setting up what bankers expect to be one of the largest stock-market debuts on record.
The company, best known for its Claude family of chatbots and coding tools, is working to finalize a $15 billion revolving credit facility before bankers begin meeting with research analysts — a step that typically precedes the public release of a prospectus, the people said. Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Citigroup are among the banks advising on the offering.
Anthropic is aiming to complete its listing just days before the November U.S. midterm elections, people familiar with the plans told Reuters, though they cautioned that the timetable — like earlier target dates that slipped through the summer — remains subject to change. Anthropic declined to comment on the reporting.
A Valuation That Keeps Climbing
The numbers being discussed would have seemed implausible a year ago. Anthropic's valuation rose to $380 billion in February after a $30 billion funding round led by Singapore's GIC and the investment firm Coatue, according to Fortune. By the time the company raised a further $65 billion in a Series H round in May, that figure had jumped to $965 billion. Anthropic confidentially filed its IPO paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission on June 1, according to Wealth Professional, and some investors are now telling bankers the public offering itself could price the company near $2 trillion — a figure that would rank among the largest IPOs ever attempted.
That comparison isn't hypothetical. Elon Musk's SpaceX went public in June at a record valuation, and Anthropic's bankers are said to be using that debut as a reference point while they gauge how much public investors will pay for an AI company that, unlike a rocket and satellite business with decades of hardware revenue, is still built almost entirely around software that didn't exist five years ago.
The credit facility underscores how much capital Anthropic believes it will need regardless of what public shareholders eventually decide. At $15 billion, the facility would dwarf the revolving line the company carried as recently as last year, reflecting both the cost of training frontier models and the data-center capacity Anthropic has committed to lease from its cloud partners.
A Debut Timed Into a Jittery Market
The slide toward mid-October has already cost Anthropic a cleaner run at the market. The company had once hoped to make its prospectus public by late summer; bankers now expect that filing within days, with analyst meetings compressed into a shorter window because, as one person familiar with the process told Reuters, investors already know the company well after a year of blockbuster funding rounds.
The listing would also land in a market increasingly focused on how much debt the broader AI buildout is absorbing, with policymakers and ratings analysts warning in recent days that heavy borrowing tied to AI infrastructure could leave financial markets more exposed if growth expectations disappoint. Anthropic's bankers are betting that public investors will draw a sharp line between a company selling AI software directly to customers and the data-center operators taking on debt to build the computing capacity underneath it.
A listing of the size Anthropic is contemplating would also test how closely rival OpenAI follows, and whether the two companies end up competing for the same pool of IPO investors within months of each other. For now, Anthropic's roadshow — whenever it formally begins — will be the clearest signal yet of how public markets price a company whose entire business has existed for less than five years.
