AI lab Anthropic has launched the roadshow for its long-awaited initial public offering. The company announced a price range of $70 to $78 a share, a range that would value the AI lab at up to $1.4 trillion on a fully diluted basis, but is well short of the $2 trillion that some news outlets had reported just weeks ago. Anthropic filed confidentially in June and made its prospectus public on Oct. 26. SpaceX, which listed in June, had sought a valuation of about $1.75 trillion. Trading in Anthropic shares could start as early as Wednesday or Thursday next week.
Anthropic is selling 825 million shares on the Nasdaq under the ticker “ANT,” which would raise up to $64.4 billion at the top of the range. Seven strategic partners, including Google and Nvidia, have also agreed to buy $26 billion of non-voting stock at the IPO price.
Tuesday’s amended filing adds that Anthropic’s annualized revenue run rate reached about $81 billion as of the end of October, up from roughly $71 billion in late September.
The IPO has landed at a difficult time for the broader AI industry. Following the Democrats’ major gains in the midterms, the AI sector has faced a sharp sell-off as fears over stricter regulation and tougher scrutiny, especially around the data center buildout, have spooked investors. The Nasdaq fell 5.5% last week and erased nearly $2.5 trillion in market value in a single session, as some analysts warned the market was tipping into correction territory.
Instability at Nvidia,one of Anthropic’s key strategic partners, has added to the market jitters. The chipmaker’s shares closed down more than 4% on Monday after the company’s board opened an independent investigation in the wake of reports that CEO Jensen Huang had been the target of a Chinese intelligence-gathering effort, after he was romantically linked to a woman named Alice Huang. She served as an executive at Singapore-based cloud computing and data center company Megaspeed, and U.S. intelligence agents believe her to be to an asset of China’s main intelligence agency. Beijing has called the accusations baseless while Nvidia has said Jensen Huang fully supports the review.
The market nerves around the midterms and Nvidia’s future add to earlier fears—often voiced by Anthropic—about the safety, and potential existential risk, of the AI systems the labs are building.
Anthropic’s prospectus also carries a fresh warning about the company’s progress toward recursive self-improvement (RSI)—the point at which AI systems become capable enough to substantially build their own successors, with each generation speeding up development of the next. RSI has been a long-held safety concern because that feedback loop could, in theory, push AI capabilities forward faster than humans can test, understand, or control them. Anthropic’s filing acknowledges the risk, warning that using AI to build more capable AI “could also pose a considerable safety risk, particularly if it sharply accelerates the pace of progress.”
In a new amendment, Anthropic said internal estimates about future models indicate it “may imminently meet” its Responsible Scaling Policy’s definition of “dramatically accelerated progress attributable to AI.” The policy pegs that threshold at roughly a doubling in the pace of AI progress, driven substantially by AI automating research. Anthropic said no current model has crossed it and that it is considering policy changes “to keep humans in control of frontier model development.”
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