Anthropic emailed bankers the first price range for its blockbuster stock market listing late on Monday, then hours later told them the numbers were wrong. The filing copy put about 867 million shares at 70 to 80 dollars each, a sale worth up to 69.3 billion dollars, before a follow-up email withdrew the pricing and promised a corrected filing. The stumble lands on the eve of the roadshow Anthropic is expected to open on Tuesday, leaving the most watched listing of the year without a confirmed price.
What Anthropic sent — and then withdrew
The first email carried a copy of the offering document. It showed Anthropic selling about 843 million new shares, with existing shareholders selling about 23 million more, for roughly 867 million Class A shares in total. At 70 to 80 dollars a share, the sale would have raised between about 61 and 69 billion dollars.
Hours later a second email told the banks the pricing details were inaccurate and that Anthropic would update the filing later. The company declined to comment, and neither the email nor the company said what was wrong — whether the share count, the price range, or both. Until a corrected filing appears, the figures that circulated on Monday are unconfirmed.
The 26 billion dollar side deal
The filing copy also showed Anthropic lining up 26 billion dollars from seven of the biggest technology companies, to arrive alongside the listing. Google, Nvidia, AMD, Broadcom, Micron, Microsoft and TSMC had agreed to buy Class N stock at the IPO price, in a placement closing after the offering. It is not yet clear whether that side deal is affected.
What happens next
Anthropic is expected to open its roadshow to investors on Tuesday, with pricing to follow next week. Trading could begin as soon as 19 or 20 November, according to the Wall Street Journal. The roadshow is the first chance for the company to test what investors will pay, after reports that the valuation it can command has been falling.
The listing comes as other artificial intelligence infrastructure companies have delayed or withdrawn their own plans, facing higher interest rates and a sharp sell-off in AI shares. Investors once discussed a valuation of as much as 2 trillion dollars for Anthropic; 1.5 trillion dollars is now viewed as the high end. CoreWeave reports its own results later on Tuesday.
Scepticism has been building for days. One investor has warned the listing is priced on pure optimism, while a major asset manager now expects the company’s debt to carry a junk rating after the offering. The retracted price range — the first numbers anyone had seen — was the market’s chance to test those doubts, and it lasted only hours.
Why It Matters
This is the listing the whole AI industry has been waiting for, and its first public price just evaporated. Anthropic is the first pure-play AI company heading for the public markets at this scale, so its terms set the benchmark for every AI valuation that follows. A shaky start hands sceptics their sharpest argument yet.
Our Read
The retraction matters less for the numbers than for what it says about the rush. Anthropic is trying to list before Thanksgiving, in a market that has just punished AI stocks, and the first document its bankers received had to be taken back. That is the kind of slip that makes investors ask what else was hurried.
The growth story is real: revenue reached almost 17 billion dollars in the three months to the end of September, and the new Claude Fable models arrived on Monday. But growth bought with nearly 900 billion dollars of future computing commitments is a fragile foundation for a 70-dollar share. The corrected filing will tell investors which number Anthropic actually believes.
Background
Anthropic filed its listing document on 26 October and amended it on 2 November; both versions left the price range, the share count and the amount to be raised blank. The company, founded in 2021 by OpenAI executives, plans to list on Nasdaq under the ticker ANT, and has opened the offering to retail investors in Australia and through JPMorgan.
Source: Reuters exclusive · InvestingLive report
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