Anthropic, the artificial intelligence company behind the Claude chatbot, plans to sell shares at $70 to $78 apiece in a Nasdaq listing that could value it at about $1.3 trillion — roughly £1 trillion — and raise as much as $64 billion.
The company, which will trade under the symbol ANT from Nov. 19, said the offering would place its valuation between $1.1 trillion and $1.3 trillion. That is well below the $2 trillion some backers predicted in the summer, though it would still rank the five-year-old firm among the most valuable companies to reach public markets.
The price range lands at a volatile moment for large technology firms. The Nasdaq fell sharply after last week’s US midterm elections on concerns that a Democrat-led Congress could slow the development of AI and the construction of data centers. Investors are also questioning whether the billions of dollars being poured into AI infrastructure will pay off.
Revenue up sharply, losses wider
Anthropic’s latest results show rapid growth alongside steep losses. Revenue for the six months through the end of June reached $16.2 billion, up from $1.1 billion in the same period a year earlier. Its pre-tax loss widened to $80.7 billion from $12.9 billion.
Fiona Cincotta, a senior market analyst at City Index, called the $64 billion target “fairly bullish” given “the volatility [and] concerns towards AI that we’ve seen in sort of particularly last week.” She added: “It’s showing that they are still sort of upbeat about the outlook as far as AI is concerned and that obviously that they think that the demand is going to be there.”
As the first fully AI-focused company to go public, Anthropic will serve as a test case for the technology’s future. Even at the top of its range it would sit below SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rocket, satellite and artificial intelligence business, which listed shares in June at a valuation of nearly $1.8 trillion.
Risk warnings accompany listing plans
Anthropic is five years old. Dario and Daniela Amodei, a brother-and-sister team, co-founded it in 2021 with five others, all of whom had worked at OpenAI, the rival AI giant behind ChatGPT. Anthropic announced its intention to list in June, and OpenAI followed with plans for a listing now expected early next year.
The flotation plans came after a series of episodes in which AI agents — bots designed to operate somewhat autonomously — went rogue. Current and former staff at both companies have warned that AI technology is being developed without the ability to protect humanity from possible future harms enacted by AI.
Anthropic warned last month that AI could pose “catastrophic or existential risks to humanity.” In its own risk language, the company has acknowledged that advanced systems “could, if not developed, deployed, and operated with appropriate safeguards, oversight, and security measures, pose catastrophic or existential risks to humanity, particularly if such systems were misused, replicated, weaponized, or allowed to operate with a high degree of autonomy.” It has repeated its commitment to developing AI that benefits people.
The company has also cautioned investors that its future success depends largely on its ability to develop the most advanced AI models, and that “any failure to do so could adversely affect our business.”