Anthropic formally launched its IPO roadshow on Tuesday, proposing to sell 825 million Class A shares at $70 to $78 apiece and seek a Nasdaq listing under the ticker ANT. The company said 801.35 million of those shares would be sold by Anthropic itself, while existing holders would sell the remainder; the registration statement is not yet effective.¹

At the top of the range, the offering could raise $64.35 billion and put Anthropic’s fully diluted value at roughly $1.405 trillion. The company is aiming to price on Nov. 18 and begin trading Nov. 19, while allocating an unusually large 20% of the deal to retail investors, according to people familiar with the plans.²

The number is immense, but also notably below the $2 trillion valuation some investors had anticipated. That gap is central to the more charitable market reading: Anthropic may be deliberately leaving room for demand to build. Dan Ives, of Yorkville Ives & Co., argued that “a deal of this size gets one shot at its debut, and making it digestible for the market matters more than the last turn of valuation.”³

Bankers may nonetheless be testing the ceiling. Reports said strong interest could allow pricing above the filed range, potentially lifting the value to $1.5 trillion or more. Ives framed the investor choice more bluntly as a contest between “margin against growth,” with the stock’s prospects hinging on whether its profits or losses better reflect its underlying trajectory.⁴

The bullish case rests on momentum and powerful backers: Google, Nvidia, Microsoft and four other technology groups have agreed to buy $26 billion of non-voting shares at the IPO price. But that arrangement also sharpens a criticism that AI is being financed in increasingly circular fashion. Anthropic’s filing shows rapidly expanding revenue alongside enormous compute demands, leaving public investors to decide whether this is the sector’s defining validation—or its most expensive stress test.⁵