Anthropic prices its IPO at $70–$78 a share, targeting up to $1.4 trillion

Anthropic put a price on itself on Tuesday. The Claude maker opened the roadshow for its initial public offering at $70 to $78 a share, a range that would raise as much as $64.35 billion and rank among the largest listings in history. The headline number — a valuation of up to $1.4 trillion — comes with an asterisk that matters more than the number itself.

A roadshow is the sales pitch: company executives and their banks spend the week presenting the deal to fund managers and taking orders. Anthropic is offering 825 million Class A shares, of which 801,351,354 are new shares sold by the company. The remaining 23,648,646 come from existing shareholders, who keep that money themselves. The banks running the deal also get a 30-day option to buy up to 123.75 million additional shares. Nothing can actually be sold until the Securities and Exchange Commission declares the registration statement effective.

The deal, in numbers#

The $1.4 trillion number needs unpacking#

The two valuations in circulation are not two different deals. They are two ways of counting the same company. Anthropic expects about 13.1 billion shares outstanding once the offering and the private placement close, which puts the value at $70 to $78 a share at roughly $916 billion to $1.02 trillion. Add stock options, restricted stock and unvested employee shares, and the fully diluted figure reaches about $1.4 trillion at the top of the range. The New York Times puts the fully diluted range at $1.26 trillion to $1.41 trillion, depending on the final price.

Either way, the number is a comedown from where this deal was headed. As recently as a few months ago, there was speculation Anthropic could be valued at roughly $2 trillion, which would have made it the most valuable company ever to go public — SpaceX was valued at $1.77 trillion when it went public in June. Before Tuesday’s announcement, investors had settled on $1.5 trillion as a more realistic figure. Anthropic’s last private round, in May, valued it at $965 billion.

Seven customers are also buyers#

Alongside the public offering, seven chip and cloud companies have agreed to buy $26 billion of Anthropic stock in a separate private placement, at the IPO price and in non-voting shares. Google and Nvidia lead with $10 billion each. AMD is in for $2.5 billion, Microsoft, Broadcom and Micron for $1 billion each, and TSMC for $500 million. Together with the public offering, Anthropic expects about $84.6 billion in net proceeds at the midpoint price of $74 a share.

Look at that list and the circularity is the story. The companies selling Anthropic the chips and cloud capacity it needs to train Claude are also buying a stake in the company that buys from them. It is a vote of confidence, and it is also a commercial relationship dressed up as one. Nvidia alone is both Anthropic’s key supplier and a $10 billion investor in the deal.

Anthropic is also aiming to sell about 20% of the shares to individual investors, against the 5% to 10% that is usual in a large offering, according to CNBC. Retail demand is the part of this deal the banks cannot fully control — and the part that will show up first in the opening price.

The financials behind the price#

The updated filing shows why investors are willing to pay up — and why they are nervous. Anthropic generated $33.2 billion in revenue in the first nine months of 2026, against $2.5 billion in the same period last year. Annualized revenue reached about $81 billion at October 31, up $10 billion in a single month. That is growth at a scale the public markets have rarely seen from a company this young.

The other side of the ledger is just as large. The company reported a net loss of $104 billion for the nine months, but $94.3 billion of that came from changes in the fair value of convertible notes and other financial instruments — paper losses tied to the rising value of the company itself, not cash going out the door. The operating loss, the number closer to the actual cost of running the business, was $1.3 billion.

Then there is the bill that never appears in the headline numbers. Anthropic’s total purchase and lease commitments now stand at about $900.9 billion, and around $70.7 billion of that falls due within twelve months of September 30. That is the cost of the compute the company has promised to buy — mostly from the same suppliers now investing in its stock. Revenue is growing fast, but so is the obligation to keep buying the machines that make the revenue possible.

A cooler market than the one Anthropic planned for#

Anthropic is listing into a market that has spent the last month questioning the AI trade. The tech-heavy Nasdaq had its worst month in a while in October, as chipmakers and the so-called neoclouds sank. Nvidia hit an all-time high of $243.37 a share on October 6, only to close Monday at $178.67. CNBC reported on Friday that $1 trillion to $1.25 trillion had come to look like the “more likely” valuation for Anthropic.

The filing itself contains a warning that reads oddly in a document designed to sell shares: Anthropic tells prospective investors that AI could pose “catastrophic or existential risks to humanity.” It is the kind of sentence that is jarring to grapple with as an investor — and, for a company whose product is the thing being warned about, an unusually honest one.

Anthropic is not the only frontier lab heading for the public markets. OpenAI filed confidentially to go public in June, though it is not expected to list before the end of the year. Whoever goes second will do so with Anthropic’s debut as the reference price for the whole sector.

What to watch#

Pricing is expected on November 18, with trading to begin on Nasdaq under the ticker ANT on November 19, according to CNBC; the Wall Street Journal puts the debut at November 19 or 20. Three things will tell you how the deal really went: whether the final price lands inside the $70–$78 range or below it, whether the 20% retail allocation holds up under real demand, and whether the first week of trading steadies the AI trade after October’s selloff — or confirms that investors have started discounting the frontier labs. The $1.4 trillion figure will make the headlines either way. The price on November 18 is the number that counts.