Anthropic has begun presenting its initial public offering of shares, under the ticker ANT on Nasdaq, to investors, with trading potentially starting as early as next week. The price range has been published and the offering is being presented to investors, with Goldman Sachs taking the lead role in the deal.
Counting only the shares that will be in circulation after the offering, Anthropic is valued between approximately $916bn and $1.02tn. When employee options and other shares that may yet be issued are added, the figure rises to $1.405tn. Goldman Sachs presented investors with projections indicating that revenue by 2030 should exceed $600bn, more than ten times this year’s level, while the first operating profit is expected to arrive in 2029.
The company was founded in 2021 by a group of former OpenAI researchers. Each of the seven co-founders holds between 231m and 244m shares, worth around $18bn per person at the top of the price range. The co-founders have pledged to donate 80 per cent of this amount to charitable causes. Anthropic is a public benefit corporation (PBC), and the co-founders retain the majority of voting rights.
The offering includes provisions for retail investors: Anthropic is allocating 15 to 20 per cent of the offering to them, similar to the percentage SpaceX allocated in June. JPMorgan is leading the sale in the US, and shares should be available to British investors via the RetailBook platform. Google, Nvidia and AMD are purchasing shares in a private placement, while Anthropic is simultaneously one of the largest buyers of chips and cloud services from these companies. Google is an early investor that also sells cloud services to Anthropic, while Amazon’s convertible notes are now worth close to $100bn.
Despite growth, subscriptions – ranging from personal Pro and Max packages to business plans – account for only about a fifth of revenue. Since April, subscriptions no longer cover external tools for AI agents such as OpenClaw, and weekly limits for Claude Code were effectively reduced in September. In the prospectus, the company warns that competition could force it to lower prices.
The IPO is accompanied by a degree of controversy. In September, Anthropic confused bankers with the idea that the entire industry should slow down the development of the most advanced AI models. David Sacks, the White House AI advisor, then called for the listing to be halted while allegations by a former Anthropic researcher regarding safety risks were investigated, and a similar request was made by the New York City comptroller.
