Anthropic is poised for a significant stock market launch — featuring a substantial valuation, considerable expenses, cautionary notes, and considerable uncertainty for investors, serving as a potential barometer for the fluctuating artificial intelligence sector by 2027.
In a revised filing with U.S. regulators on Tuesday, Anthropic, headquartered in San Francisco, indicated an anticipated price range for its initial public offering (IPO) of $70 to $78 per share. This suggests a fully diluted market valuation of approximately $1.3 trillion at the midpoint, rising to $1.4 trillion at the upper limit, which would set a record for the largest technology stock market launch.
Greg Taylor, a portfolio manager at Vancouver’s PenderFund Capital Management, remarked, “This is going to be one of the largest IPOs ever.”
The scale of an IPO is generally gauged by the total capital raised. Anthropic aims to generate up to $64.4 billion through its public share offering. If successful, it will follow closely behind SpaceX’s historic stock market entry in June.
Taylor anticipates that trading of Anthropic shares will commence before the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday on November 26, while Wealthsimple, a prominent Canadian financial app, lists November 30 as the expected “IPO day.”
Ernest Wong, the head of research at Baskin Wealth Management in Toronto, expects Anthropic’s stock to be a major player upon its debut on the Nasdaq exchange.
“Only a few companies globally have valuations exceeding $1 trillion,” he stated. “This indicates the immense significance of AI.”
Following Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s admission of an affair with a suspected Chinese spy, concerns regarding the company’s governance and broader implications for AI’s future have emerged.
What is Anthropic?
Founded in 2021, Anthropic began as a specialized AI research laboratory when its creators departed from OpenAI, citing a profit-driven focus that neglected risks and granted excessive control to investors.
The company gained traction in 2024 with the launch of Claude 3.5 Sonnet, which outperformed OpenAI’s GPT-4o on critical performance indicators while being significantly more cost-effective than prior leading AI models.
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Will Anthropic’s IPO go boom or bust?
Differentiating itself from traditional profit-driven companies like Apple or Microsoft, Anthropic operates as a public benefit corporation, which mandates its board to weigh public safety against maximizing shareholder value.
Currently, Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei champions AI safety, advocating for a deceleration in industry development to allow safety protocols to keep pace.
In its latest regulatory submission to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, 94 out of over 300 pages were devoted to detailing numerous risk factors.
The company noted, “Our AI models could act in unintended, misaligned, or autonomous manners, potentially executing harmful actions that no user or third party intended.”
Anthropic warned this could manifest as “behavior resembling blackmail or attempts to sway human decision-makers to maintain the model’s operation,” along with actions that “could pose catastrophic or existential threats to humanity.”
Big numbers
The $1.4 trillion valuation is not the only striking figure associated with Anthropic’s IPO.
The company’s valuation has seen dramatic fluctuations in recent months, with figures as high as $2 trillion under consideration. In late May, private investors valued the firm at $965 billion, a rise from $380 billion in February.
“These valuations reflect a considerable amount of optimism,” Taylor remarked.
“No one can accurately predict what Anthropic will look like in five years.”
Dario Amodei, CEO and co-founder of Anthropic, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, January 2025. (Markus Schreiber/The Associated Press)
Sales for the company have surged. Regulatory documents reveal that Anthropic earned over three and a half times its revenue in the first half of 2026 compared to the entire previous year, with around 20% coming from two significant unnamed clients.
Conversely, the AI giant has also incurred substantial losses. It reported a net loss of $80.7 billion through June this year, largely attributed to non-cash accounting charges. The company faced a $42 billion loss in 2025.
Anthropic has ambitious financial plans as well. Instead of owning physical data centers, it leases high-performance computing resources from cloud providers like Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud through extensive long-term service agreements.
According to regulatory documents, Anthropic has secured nearly $900 billion in cloud and computing contracts extending into the 2030s and 2040s. Key partners in these agreements include Broadcom, SpaceX AI, Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft Azure.
A blockbuster IPO
The significance of Anthropic’s IPO extends beyond its sheer size.
“Investing in the Anthropic IPO represents one of the first pure play AI opportunities available,” Taylor noted.
Previously, investors interested in capitalizing on the AI surge were largely limited to less AI-centric tech companies like Microsoft or Nvidia, which manufactures chips. While Google is often associated with AI investments, it also operates substantial businesses unrelated to AI, such as Android smartphones and YouTube.
“Their sole focus is on developing new AI models,” Wong remarked regarding Anthropic. “This fills a critical gap, as public company data from various AI stakeholders are available, except for model companies, primarily Anthropic and OpenAI.”
If Anthropic’s IPO is deemed a new standard for AI investment, its early trading days will occur in a context of notable volatility within the tech sector.
Earlier this month, tech and AI stocks underwent sharp sell-offs followed by quick recoveries as the market faced corrections. This was partly driven by concerns over AI companies balancing their substantial expenditures with adequate profits and intensified by political worries in the U.S. regarding stricter regulations for AI and data centers following the midterms.
Additionally, the recent controversy surrounding Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s alleged relationship with a suspected Chinese spy has introduced another layer of concern for AI investments. The chipmaker’s stock, regarded as a key indicator for the AI market, has lost billions in market value recently on the Nasdaq, where Anthropic plans to launch.
Like the dot com bubble?
Wong noted, “The primary risk for Anthropic lies in its competition with other model providers in a highly competitive landscape. OpenAI creates its own models, while SpaceX, through Grok, is a significant player in this arena. Google and Meta are also vying for position.”
He anticipates that the stock will be volatile in the early stages as investors assess each new Anthropic product against its competitors and scrutinize its substantial spending on data services.
“It will indeed be quite unstable,” Wong cautioned.
This has been evident with SpaceX since its Nasdaq debut in June, where the stock surged around 19% on its first day, only to subsequently plunge as much as 22% below its $135 IPO price.
For Taylor, the extensive spending in the AI sector, rapid stock price increases, and close business connections among a select few tech firms serve as reminders of a prior investment boom that starkly distinguished between winners and losers.
“The dot-com bubble is certainly a comparison that resonates with many,” he remarked. “Everyone wanted to invest in the internet back in 2000.”
While companies like Pets.com failed, Google and Microsoft emerged as giants.
“There are significant parallels with AI,” Taylor observed. “The key question is determining who will ultimately succeed.”