The biggest IPO of the AI era has a price range. This morning, Anthropic — the company behind the Claude AI models — filed updated terms with the SEC: 825 million shares at $70 to $78 each, on the Nasdaq under the ticker ANT, in an offering that would raise roughly $58 billion to $64 billion. The roadshow to pitch big investors started today, and CNBC reports the company aims to price the deal on November 18 and start trading November 19.
The deal
At the top of the range, Anthropic would be worth about $1.02 trillion on its post-offering share count — roughly $1.4 trillion fully diluted, by TechCrunch’s math. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are leading the sale, underwriters can buy up to 123.75 million additional shares, and the company says up to 20% of the shares may go to retail investors, about double the usual allocation. CNBC reports the institutional order book was already covered across the range.
Alongside the public offering, seven of the biggest names in tech agreed to buy $26 billion of non-voting shares at the IPO price: about $10 billion each from Google and Nvidia, $2.5 billion from AMD, $1 billion each from Broadcom, Micron, and Microsoft, and $500 million from TSMC. Read that list again — Anthropic’s largest suppliers, its cloud landlords, and its rivals’ closest partners are all buying in.
There was a sign of the jitters underneath. On Monday, an earlier version of the filing — 867 million shares at $70 to $80, nearly $70 billion — was circulated to banks and then retracted as inaccurate, Reuters reported. Today’s filing is the trimmed, official one. Expectations that were floating at $1.5 trillion, even $2 trillion, a month ago have come down to earth.
The numbers behind it
The growth is real. Anthropic’s revenue for the first half of 2026 was $16.3 billion, up from $1.2 billion in the same period a year earlier, and the updated filing says its revenue run rate reached $81 billion by the end of October. The company posted its first operating profit in the second quarter, then swung back to a $567 million operating loss in the third — and Reuters reports the prospectus points to some $518 billion in planned cloud and computing commitments ahead. This is a company spending at infrastructure scale to stay in the race.
The valuation path tells the story of the year: $380 billion in a February funding round, $965 billion in May, and now a public price around a trillion. Anthropic is a public benefit corporation, and its founders hold a special share class with 50.1% of the voting power — public investors are buying the economics, not control.
The field Anthropic is joining
OpenAI remains the distribution king: ChatGPT has more than 900 million weekly users, the company was valued at $852 billion in its March round with a revenue run rate around $40 billion by August, and it has reportedly explored valuations near $1.25 trillion. It filed confidentially in June, but Sam Altman has ruled out a 2026 IPO — which makes Anthropic’s debut the opening act.
xAI took the strangest route to the public markets: it merged into SpaceX in February, and SpaceX listed on the Nasdaq in June, carrying Elon Musk’s AI lab with it. Google DeepMind (Alphabet) and Meta’s superintelligence effort fight the same race from inside two of the largest public companies on earth, funded by advertising cash rather than venture rounds. Europe’s champion, Mistral, is valued around €21 billion — a reminder of how American this market is. And hovering over all of it is Nvidia, the multi-trillion-dollar arms dealer selling the chips every one of them needs — and now buying $10 billion of Anthropic on the side.
The outlook
ANT will be the first major test of AI valuations since the recent tech sell-off, and both sides can point to evidence. Bulls see the fastest revenue ramp in corporate history and an order book already covered. Bears see a trillion-dollar price on a company that just swung back to losing money, with half a trillion in spending commitments and a price range that had to be trimmed once already.
What happens on November 19 matters beyond Anthropic. A strong debut opens the door for OpenAI and the rest of the private AI giants to go public in 2027 at enormous valuations. A weak one reprices the whole sector — including the private marks that pension funds and endowments are already carrying. Either way, next week the AI boom stops being a private-market story and becomes a public one, with a ticker anyone can buy — and sell.
Sources: TechCrunch, “Anthropic sets IPO price range of $70 to $78 per share” (November 10, 2026); Reuters, “Anthropic’s nearly $70 billion IPO plan briefly circulated to banks, then retracted” (November 9–10, 2026); Dealroom’s summary of Amendment No. 2 to Anthropic’s Form S-1 (November 10, 2026); CNBC reporting on pricing and trading dates, via TechCrunch and Dealroom.
