Anthropic opened the roadshow for its landmark IPO on Tuesday with a corrected filing that prices the deal well below the figures that leaked a day earlier. The company and its investors plan to sell 825 million shares at $70 to $78 each, raising up to $64.4 billion at a valuation of about $1 trillion, according to the latest draft prospectus. The new terms replace the $70-to-$80 range and $69.3 billion total that were circulated to banks on Monday and retracted within hours as inaccurate.
What the corrected filing says
The offering covers 825 million shares, with Anthropic selling most of them and existing shareholders selling the rest. A separate $26 billion private placement from cornerstone investors including Google, Nvidia and AMD takes the total fundraising to as much as $90.4 billion. Broadcom, Micron, Microsoft and TSMC are also among the cornerstone backers.
The shares are expected to list on Nasdaq under the ticker ANT, with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley leading the banks underwriting the deal. Certain board members and their affiliates have indicated interest in buying up to $303 million of shares. Pricing is expected next week, with trading to follow as early as Thursday or Friday.
A smaller number than the market expected
The $1 trillion valuation is well short of the $1.5 trillion figure investors discussed only weeks ago, and far below the $2 trillion some expected earlier this year. The comedown reflects a cooler market for AI stocks, which suffered a sharp sell-off last week as investors questioned whether huge infrastructure spending will pay off.
The prospectus also lays out the scale of Anthropic’s bet. The company has nearly $900 billion in computing commitments with partners including Amazon and Google, much of it dependent on financing beyond its control. It warned that rivals could develop models faster, and that AI advances could outpace its safety measures.
The business behind the listing
The numbers behind the filing are strong, if slowing. Anthropic’s revenue jumped 47 per cent in the third quarter to $16.96 billion, after surging 144 per cent in the prior quarter, while its net loss narrowed. Growth has been driven by demand for Claude, including specialised products for healthcare, financial services and legal work.
Anthropic was last valued at $965 billion in a private funding round, and its backers include Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks and Sequoia Capital. Founded in 2021 by researchers who left OpenAI over governance and safety disagreements, the company is led by chief executive Dario Amodei and now competes directly with its former home.
Our Read
The correction is the story. A $5 billion haircut in less than a day, imposed by the market rather than the company, tells investors more about the AI boom’s mood than any roadshow slide will. Anthropic still looks set to stage the largest IPO on record, but it will do so at a price that admits the frenzy has cooled.
The contrast with OpenAI is sharp. OpenAI has just closed about $11 billion at a $1.25 trillion valuation and dropped its own IPO plans, choosing private money over public scrutiny. Anthropic is taking the opposite path, and its pricing will be read as the first public-market verdict on whether frontier AI labs are worth trillion-dollar valuations.
There is also a quiet admission in the prospectus itself. Its talk of an “age of miracles” sits beside warnings of existential risk, rogue agents escaping their sandboxes and infrastructure bills approaching a trillion dollars. The filing sells a miracle and discloses a gamble in the same document, and investors will price both.
Why It Matters
This is the first public-market test of a frontier AI lab, and the corrected price sets the terms. If the roadshow fills at $70 to $78, every other AI valuation gets a new anchor; if it struggles, the whole sector’s trillion-dollar maths gets questioned.
The $26 billion of cornerstone money from Anthropic’s own customers and suppliers is both a vote of confidence and a reminder of how circular the AI economy has become. Google and Nvidia buy the shares and sell Anthropic the compute.
Background
Monday’s retraction set up today’s correction: Anthropic sent banks a filing showing about 867 million shares at $70 to $80, worth up to $69.3 billion, then emailed hours later to say the pricing was inaccurate. The episode followed weeks of investor doubt about a $1.5 trillion valuation, and a new Claude Fable 5.2 and Mythos 5.2 launch.
Source: Reuters report and CNA’s full wire account
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