Anthropic Goes Public at a Valuation of Up to 1,404 Billion Dollars, and Lost 104 Billion in Nine Months

Anthropic, the company behind the Claude model, has announced the terms of its stock market listing. It is offering 825 million shares at a price of 70 to 78 dollars and expects to raise between 57.75 and 64.35 billion dollars. If the shares start trading at the top price, the whole company would be worth 1,404 billion dollars - more than the 965 billion at its last funding round in May, but far below the 2,000 billion that was rumoured to be the target a few months ago.

Alongside the listing, the company is privately selling non-voting shares worth 26 billion dollars, at the same price as on the exchange. The buyers are AMD, Broadcom, Google, Micron, Microsoft, Nvidia and TSMC, with Google and Nvidia putting in 10 billion each. In other words, the companies Anthropic buys chips and cloud capacity from are now also becoming its owners. The money in this industry goes round in circles. In total, the net inflow would be between 84.6 and 93.7 billion dollars.

The figures in the prospectus are even more interesting than the price. Annualised revenue at the current pace reached 81 billion dollars at the end of October, some ten billion more than a month earlier. In the third quarter alone, revenue was 17 billion. But for the first nine months of the year the company reported a net loss of 104 billion dollars, and commitments for computing power and infrastructure reached 900.9 billion. It has almost 132 billion in cash. It grows fast, and spends even faster.

Buyers on the exchange won't get much of a say. The founders hold a special class of shares with 50.1 percent of the votes, and a separate long-term trust elects the majority of the board. Seven of the founders, including CEO Dario Amodei and President Daniela Amodei, are each selling almost 3.4 million shares - around 250 million dollars each, at the mid-price of 74 dollars.

Trading on Nasdaq is expected around 19 November, under the ticker "ANT", and up to 20 percent of the offering is earmarked for small investors. One small change in the document says a lot about the times we live in: in several places the company uses the term "superintelligence" instead of "artificial intelligence", citing Trump's September executive order requiring federal agencies to call it that.

This is the second AI company valued at over a thousand billion dollars in just a few days: OpenAI was valued last week at 1,250 billion, after raising 11 billion - almost half of the 20 it was seeking. The market evidently still believes the story. The question is how long it will keep believing in companies that lose tens of billions a year.