Anthropic Puts a Price on Itself: $70–$78 a Share and a Trillion-Dollar Test for the AI Trade

After months of speculation, the company behind Claude has finally attached a number to its stock. In an amended registration statement filed with the SEC on Tuesday, November 10, Anthropic set a proposed price range of $70 to $78 per share for its initial public offering and kicked off its investor roadshow. The news quickly climbed to the top of r/technology and dominated investing chatter, landing on a day when tech stocks were already on edge.

The numbers in the filing

Anthropic plans to sell 825 million Class A shares, roughly 801 million of them new shares from the company and about 23.6 million from existing holders. At the proposed range, the public offering would raise between about $57.75 billion and $64.35 billion. Underwriters led by Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley get an option to buy up to 123.75 million additional shares.

On top of the IPO, Anthropic disclosed a separate $26 billion private placement of non-voting stock, sold at the IPO price to AMD, Broadcom, Google, Micron, Microsoft, Nvidia and TSMC, with Google and Nvidia each putting in $10 billion. Combined, the deal could bring in as much as roughly $90 billion.

The valuation depends on how you count. Using shares outstanding, the range works out to around $1 trillion. On a fully diluted basis (including options and other securities), TechCrunch calculated up to $1.404 trillion at the top of the range. That is well above the $965 billion Anthropic was valued at in its May funding round, but below the roughly $2 trillion figure that had been floated in earlier reports.

Timeline and who gets shares

The stock is slated to list on Nasdaq under the ticker ANT. According to people familiar with the deal cited by CNBC, Anthropic expects to price the offering on November 18 and begin trading on November 19, and is targeting about 20% retail allocation, far above the typical 5–10% for a large IPO. The same sources told CNBC the order book is already covered within the range. Those details come from unnamed sources rather than the filing itself, so treat them as reported, not confirmed.

What the S-1 reveals about the business

The updated filing paints a picture of extraordinary growth paired with extraordinary spending:

• Run-rate revenue reached $81 billion by the end of October, up about $10 billion from a month earlier.
• Third-quarter revenue was $17 billion, with $33.2 billion over the first nine months of the year.
• The company reported a nine-month net loss of $104 billion and compute and infrastructure commitments of about $900.9 billion.
• It holds close to $132 billion in cash and short-term investments.

Governance is another point buyers will scrutinize. Anthropic is a public benefit corporation, and its founders hold a special class of stock carrying 50.1% of the voting power, while its Long-Term Benefit Trust elects a majority of the board. In practice, public Class A shareholders will have limited say. The filing also shows each of the seven co-founders selling roughly 3.4 million shares, worth around $250 million apiece at the $74 midpoint.

Awkward timing for an AI mega-deal

The range arrived on a rough day for markets. A hotter-than-expected October CPI report pushed traders to bet on a December Fed rate hike; the Nasdaq fell about 0.7% and Nvidia dropped more than 5%. That follows a broader pullback from AI stocks in recent weeks. Reuters reported that a version of the prospectus circulated to banks a day earlier had shown more shares at a slightly higher $70–$80 range, which suggests the terms were trimmed at the last minute. Meanwhile, rival OpenAI was reportedly valued at $1.25 trillion after a fundraise last week.

Key takeaways

• Anthropic's proposed range is $70–$78 for 825 million shares, with a Nasdaq debut under "ANT" expected around November 19.
• Implied valuation: about $1 trillion on a basic count, up to roughly $1.4 trillion fully diluted.
• A $26 billion side deal brings in seven major tech and chip companies as strategic shareholders.
• Revenue growth is steep, but so are losses and long-term compute commitments.
• Founder-controlled voting means public investors buy economics, not control.
• Where the deal finally prices within (or outside) the range will be a real-time read on appetite for the AI trade.

The bottom line

This IPO is shaping up as a referendum on whether public markets still want to pay up for frontier AI after a shaky few weeks. Final pricing on November 18 and first-day trading will say more than any forecast. Until then, the figures above are proposals, and the final price, size and valuation can still change.

Disclosure: this article was drafted with the help of Claude, an AI model made by Anthropic, the company discussed here. This is not financial advice.

Sources: TechCrunch · CNBC · Forbes · Yahoo Finance · TheStreet · StockTitan · SEC filing (S-1/A)