Anthropic sets its IPO range at $70 to $78 a share

The talk is over. There is a number.

Anthropic launched the roadshow for its initial public offering on Tuesday and set a price range of $70 to $78 a share. It has applied to list on the Nasdaq Global Select Market as "ANT."

The terms, from Anthropic's own notice

Anthropic's announcement says the offering is 825,000,000 shares of Class A common stock.

Anthropic is selling 801,351,354 of them. Existing stockholders are selling 23,648,646, and Anthropic says it will not receive any proceeds from those.

It expects to give the underwriters a 30-day option to buy up to 123,750,000 more shares. The notice says the preliminary prospectus is available from Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, and that the registration statement filed with the SEC has not yet become effective.

The notice does not state a valuation.

Fortune reports that the top of the range would value Anthropic at up to $1.4 trillion on a fully diluted basis and raise up to $64.4 billion.

Up to $1.4 trillion.

Fortune also reports that seven strategic partners, including Google and Nvidia, agreed to buy $26 billion of non-voting stock at the IPO price, and that trading could start as early as Wednesday or Thursday next week.

Citing the amended filing, Fortune says Anthropic's annualized revenue run rate was about $81 billion at the end of October, up from roughly $71 billion in late September.

The range is lower than the hype, and that is the point

Last week, TopFive reported that prospective buyers were talking about $1.2 trillion. Fortune notes earlier reports had cited $2 trillion.

The range lands between those, in a bad week to sell AI. Fortune reports the Nasdaq fell 5.5% last week, in an AI sell-off it ties to the midterm results and to investor fears of stricter regulation and scrutiny of data center buildout.

A range is what bankers think the book will pay. The book still has to show up.

What it changes for you

If you build on Claude, this is the part that matters. A public Anthropic files quarterly reports. Its revenue, its costs and its risks stop being leaks and start being disclosures.

You have already seen what those filings can hold. Anthropic's amended S-1 showed $895 billion in compute commitments, and said it may “imminently” reach its AI R&D threshold under its responsible scaling policy.

That is more than most API customers ever learn about a supplier.

What to watch

Watch the final price against the range. Pricing at or above $78 says investors still pay up for frontier labs after a sell-off. Pricing below it says they want a discount.

Then watch the first quarterly report, and read the risk factors before the revenue line.

Price day is next week. Read the filing, not the ticker.