Anthropic is going public in just one week. Here's everything you need to know
The Claude chatbot people have on their phones is going public on November 19 and aims to raise up to $74 billion. Its revenue grew thirteenfold in a year. Its biggest buyers, meanwhile, are companies it itself owes more than $900 billion for chips and data centers.
Key points
The seven founders wrote a sentence on the first page of the prospectus that no one says before going public.
The company's valuation shifted by roughly a trillion dollars between summer and November, and trading has yet to begin.
Revenue surged 1,206% over nine months, yet the books still show a loss of $104 billion.
The companies putting $26 billion into the offering are also the ones Anthropic owes more than $900 billion.
A single share of a special class determines a majority of the votes in a trillion-dollar company.
A company that doesn't want to be worth more than it is
The chatbot you may be messaging on your phone will get a stock-market price tag on November 19, 2026. Anthropic $ANT, the company behind the Claude model, is selling shares on Nasdaq and wants to raise more money than any company in history. It is the first pure-play AI company to go public, and the market will, for the first time, say how much it is willing to pay for a large language model.
What's unusual is how Anthropic is approaching that price tag. The seven founders wrote a piece of advice on the first page of the prospectus that they say they heard from several experienced entrepreneurs: never let your company be worth a dollar more than it really is. No company talks this way before going public. Usually, it wants to sell at the highest possible price.
And it looks like they mean it. As recently as this summer, the media were talking about a valuation of around $2 trillion. The range the company announced on November 10 values it at roughly $1 trillion to $1.4 trillion. Roughly a trillion disappeared before trading even began.
But the market wouldn't have it. Three days after the roadshow began, bankers at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are considering raising the price above the announced range because there are more orders than shares. This creates a strange situation: the cheapest major AI offering anyone can remember, and the market wants it to be more expensive.
Who is actually paying for the offering is revealed in a table in the prospectus that headlines in mainstream media overlooked.