Author: Zhang Yaqi, Wall Street Journal

Anthropic is knocking on the capital market's door with the largest IPO in U.S. tech history, with a fully diluted valuation target of up to $1.4 trillion, aiming to become the first publicly traded cutting-edge artificial intelligence lab.

According to the prospectus submitted to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Tuesday, Anthropic seeks to raise up to $90.4 billion through the IPO and private placements combined. The base IPO offering size is capped at $64.4 billion, lower than the previously withdrawn version's $69.3 billion; additionally, seven tech giants including Google's parent company Alphabet, NVIDIA, AMD, Broadcom, Micron Technology, Microsoft, and TSMC will separately invest a total of $26 billion through private placements. The price range is set at $70 to $78 per share, with about 801.4 million shares expected to be offered, and some existing shareholders will sell about 23.6 million shares.

Based on the upper limit of the offering price of $78, Anthropic's valuation is approximately $1.02 trillion, slightly higher than its private placement valuation of $965 billion. The stock is expected to be listed on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker ANT, with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley as the lead underwriters, along with 20 other banks participating.

This IPO is set to be priced on November 18 (Wednesday). If the overallotment option is considered, the total fundraising amount will approach $100 billion, surpassing the previous record of $86.5 billion set by SpaceX. However, AI-related stocks recently experienced a sharp decline, and concerns about tightened oversight and rising costs for data centers have not dissipated. Anthropic is choosing to push forward with its listing amid pressured market sentiment, and the performance of its IPO will become an important indicator of investors' acceptance of the commercialization prospects of AI and high valuations.

The prospectus publicly discloses Anthropic's complete financial data for the first time. The company's revenue in the third quarter was close to $17 billion, compared to just $1.4 billion in the same period last year, showing a significant year-over-year growth rate. As of October 31, the company's annualized revenue has risen to approximately $81 billion, an increase of about $10 billion since the end of September. As of September 30, the number of customers with revenue exceeding $100,000 in the past 12 months has surpassed 11,900.

However, profitability remains unstable. The company's total operating expenses in the third quarter skyrocketed to $17.5 billion, a year-over-year increase of 292%, slipping back into an operating loss of $567 million from an operating profit of $974 million in the second quarter, which was the first profit after at least five consecutive quarters of losses. Key factors dragging down the third-quarter performance include $5 billion in short-term computing power contract costs and $2 billion in non-cash expenses related to the company's charity donation matching program.

Moreover, pricing pressures in the AI sector are eroding revenue growth. The prospectus indicates that price reductions on some new models and contract discounts for customers reduced third-quarter revenue growth by about $600 million. Anthropic lowered prices when it launched new models like Opus 5.5 in September, and competitors such as OpenAI have also recently released lower-priced models.

The cost of maintaining a technological lead is extremely high. The prospectus reveals that Anthropic's total committed expenditures amount to $895 billion, primarily for computing power and chip procurement; approximately $70 billion of this will be paid within one year ending September 2027—this figure already exceeds the individual market capitalization of about two-thirds of the constituent companies in the S&P 500 index.

Unlike tech giants with diverse revenue from ads, Anthropic currently relies almost entirely on AI services for income and must convince investors that a single AI business can generate profits far exceeding the infrastructure costs. This logic still needs time to be validated.

On the application technology front, Anthropic is seeking to embed Claude in professional service scenarios, covering sectors such as healthcare, life sciences, law, and accounting. Documents indicate that over 90% of code contributions in Anthropic's codebase have been completed by Claude. Novartis CEO Vas Narasimhan serves on Anthropic's board, indicating a deepening layout in the healthcare sector. On Monday, Anthropic released new versions of its Mythos and Fable models, both with improved speeds, and Fable's price was also reduced.

Anthropic's founding background is unique—the core team was formed by former executives from OpenAI, driven by disagreements about AI safety priorities. After nearly six years, the company is going public as a Public Benefit Corporation, with a governance structure that includes a "Long-Term Benefit Trust," possessing the power to elect and remove a majority of the company's board members, aimed at balancing shareholder interests with societal benefits.

However, the company explicitly warns in the prospectus that if AI technology develops without sufficient safeguards and oversight, it may pose "catastrophic or existential risks" to humanity. Regulators, investors, and even Anthropic's internal employees have all raised alarms about the significant risk of humanity losing control over the technology, with some estimating the probability of AI exterminating all humans within the next decade at over 10%. CEO Dario Amodei has called for top AI labs to "control the pace of advancing cutting-edge technologies" to prioritize safety.

In contrast, competitor OpenAI has set its IPO target for 2027, and its CEO Sam Altman designated 2026 as an "unwise time" to go public, citing similar AI safety concerns. According to informed sources, OpenAI is currently raising funds at a valuation of $1.25 trillion.

Anthropic's seven co-founders each hold about 1.4% of the company, which, at current valuations, already places them in the billionaire category. Even if they fulfill their commitment to donate 80% of their personal shares to charity, this judgment still holds.

On the institutional shareholder level, funds from asset management firms such as Fidelity Investments, Capital Group, and BlackRock, as well as venture capital firms like Iconiq, Spark Capital, and Sequoia Capital, hold shares of Anthropic before the IPO. Google, Amazon, and Microsoft serve as investors, customers, and computing power suppliers simultaneously.

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