We’ve never seen anything like the Anthropic IPO

Anthropic, the San Francisco-based artificial intelligence company behind the Claude chatbot, disclosed in a regulatory filing on Tuesday that it plans to sell 825 million shares priced between $70 and $78 each, according to WRAL. At the midpoint, the offering would raise more than $61 billion and value the company at approximately $1.3 trillion, making it one of the largest initial public offerings ever, though still short of the $86 billion raised by SpaceX in its June IPO. The shares are expected to list on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker symbol "ANT" this month.

A filing last month showed Anthropic's revenue reached more than $16 billion in the first half of 2026, 14 times its revenue from the same period a year earlier, but the company has yet to turn a profit. Formed in 2021 by former OpenAI leaders, including CEO Dario Amodei and his sister and cofounder Daniela Amodei, Anthropic is locked in a fight for dominance with OpenAI, Google, newer start-ups in the U.S. and China, and SpaceX's AI division. All have lost more money than they've made due to the huge costs of building AI, fueling concerns that a bubble has formed in the sector.

The IPO comes amid market volatility. A brutal sell-off last week hit stocks tied to AI data-center buildout, and shares of AI-related companies have swung wildly for months, particularly after the U.S. Federal Reserve hiked interest rates in September for the first time in three years. Anxiety about borrowing costs intensified Tuesday after a new U.S. inflation reading came in hot, raising the odds of more aggressive rate hikes.

Dan Ives, partner and senior managing director at Yorkville Ives & Co., wrote that "for tech and AI, this is the first time a U.S. frontier lab carries a standalone public market price, uncluttered by an ad business or a rocket business." The offering could give Anthropic enormous resources to accelerate expansion and potentially add billions to the fortunes of the Amodei siblings. In September, Dario Amodei cautioned that the AI industry should slow its fast-moving development to give safety measures time to catch up, warning that without such a slowdown AI could be capable of letting loose a swarm of agents that could take over the entire internet within six to 12 months. He offered a plan to increase checks on the industry, noting Anthropic is already undertaking part of it on its own, but said other steps would require coordination across the industry and with governments worldwide, including authoritarian ones.