Anthropic may hold the largest IPO in history with a valuation of $1.4 trillion

The developer of the Claude chatbot, Anthropic, expects a full market capitalization of about $1.4 trillion during the initial public offering of shares. This was reported by Bloomberg on November 10.

"The company Anthropic <...> and its co-founders plan to raise up to $90.4 billion during the IPO and private placement. <...> The basic placement will raise up to $64.4 billion, while shares will be sold at a price of $70 to $78 per share. Anthropic is offering 801.4 million shares, and investors are selling 23.6 million shares," the publication says.

According to the agency's analysts, the private placement should attract $26 billion from Advanced Micro Devices, Broadcom, Google (Alphabet), Micron Technology, Microsoft, Nvidia and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing. At the upper end of the range, the capitalization of Anthropic would be about $1 trillion based on the number of shares outstanding.

Including employee options, limited shares, and securities for the charitable donation co-financing program, the diluted value would have reached about $1.4 trillion. According to Bloomberg calculations, taking into account the greenshoe option, the target will be approximately $100 billion — more than SpaceX's base offer of $75 billion, or $86.2 billion with greenshoe.

The IPO price is scheduled to be determined on November 18, and trading will begin the next day. Seven co-founders, including CEO Dario Amodea, are offering 3.38 million shares each. The company's revenue is growing rapidly. It is specified that as of October 31, the annual revenue amounted to $81 billion against $ 65 billion at the end of July. Revenue for the third quarter reached almost $17 billion against $1.4 billion a year earlier.

At the same time, liabilities are growing: in the latest report, they increased to almost $901 billion, most of which is accounted for by computing power and microchips. About $71 billion is due to be paid for the year ending September 30, 2027. Total operating expenses in the third quarter rose to $17.5 billion, up 292% year-on-year. Operating profit in the second quarter was $974 million, and in the three months to September 30 it went down again by $567 million. The loss is related to computing costs of $5 billion and non-monetary expenses of $2 billion under the donation co-financing program.

"Lower prices for some new models, as well as contractual discounts for some customers, led to a reduction in revenue growth in the third quarter by about $ 600 million, according to the data presented," the authors note.

The company has lowered prices in new product versions, including Opus 5.5 in September; OpenAI has also released cheaper models. AI giants are facing competition from cheap open source models, including from Chinese developers.

More than 90% of the code contributed to Anthropic is written by Claude. In the filing, the company warned that AI technology could pose a "catastrophic or existential threat to humanity" without proper security and control measures. Competitor OpenAI is planning an IPO in 2027 and is raising funds at a valuation of $1.25 trillion.

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The Axios portal reported on October 25 that Washington wants artificial intelligence developers to stop publicly warning about the risks of technology and focus on work. According to the portal, the current generation of AI leaders is becoming a "political liability." Instead of explaining the benefits of technology to Americans, they constantly warn of existential threats.

On September 26, The New York Times reported that OpenAI artificial intelligence agents had attempted unauthorized access to the Internet portals of three US government departments. Software agents tried to hack the official website of the US Department of Education to collect data, extracted official information from the database of the Census Bureau using the accounts of others found on the Network.