Anthropic’s initial public offering could raise as much as $64.4bn, according to a draft prospectus seen by Reuters on Tuesday 10 November. The company and some of its investors plan to sell shares at an indicative range of $70–78 each, and a separate private placement with cornerstone investors would add $26bn. Counting both, the offering could raise up to $90.4bn.
The cornerstones named by Reuters are Alphabet’s Google, Nvidia, AMD, Broadcom, Micron, Microsoft and TSMC: in effect the company’s suppliers of chips, memory and cloud capacity. Anthropic did not respond immediately to requests for comment.
A price range, then a retraction
The draft followed an awkward Monday. Anthropic emailed bankers a version of the filing that priced shares at $70–80 and set a sale of 867 million shares, for up to $69.3bn, then redacted it and said correct pricing would follow, Reuters reported, as relayed by Stocktwits. Shay Boloor of Futurum Equities estimated the valuation implied by that version at about $1.4tn.
The Wall Street Journal reported that Anthropic intends to set its valuation range this week and start trading on Thursday or Friday of next week, TechCrunch noted. Some institutional investors want a valuation below the $1.5tn discussed as recently as last week, which was itself well short of the $2tn floated a few months ago.
What buyers are being asked to price
The numbers in the company’s updated S-1 are large in both directions. Third-quarter revenue was about $17bn, up roughly 1,127% year on year, but sequential growth slowed to 47% from 144% in the second quarter. The quarter produced an operating loss of $567m after a $974m operating profit three months earlier, and spending commitments reach $895.4bn through 2045, with about $69.8bn due in the twelve months after 30 September. Cash and liquid assets stood at $146.6bn.
The company spent the same week showing what that money buys. On Monday it released Claude Fable 5.2 and Claude Mythos 5.2, priced at $8 per million input tokens and $40 per million output tokens and, by Anthropic’s account, up to 30% faster than the 5.1 versions. On the FrontierCode benchmark, which tests whether code changes would be merged by open-source maintainers, Fable 5.2 at high effort scored 45.3% against Opus 5.5’s best of 45.5% for roughly half the cost per task.
It also bought power. Anthropic agreed to buy $3.4bn of Caterpillar gas generators, up to 1.7 gigawatts, that the supplier OnePWR had ordered but could not finance, TechCrunch reported, citing the Financial Times. For a company that has preferred renting capacity, owning turbines is a sign of how long the queues for both equipment and grid connections have become.
What it means for private AI rounds
The IPO will put a public price on a frontier lab for the first time. Last week OpenAI accepted roughly $11bn at a $1.25tn mark, short of the $20bn it originally sought. If Anthropic prices near the $1.4tn implied by Monday’s withdrawn figures, private AI valuations will have a public reference point that holds up. If it prices well below, every late-stage AI round marked against the frontier labs will need to be re-marked.
The share count and price in the draft can still change before marketing begins, and the final terms will appear only in the priced prospectus. Until then, $64.4bn is a ceiling, not a result.
