B.Y.O.B. (Bring Your Own Bag)

So much for Claude telling Elon to hold its beer.

Anthropic said in an updated filing Tuesday that it’ll sell 825 million shares at $70 to $78 apiece in its IPO. Per people familiar, it prices Nov. 18 and starts trading on the Nasdaq as ANT on Nov. 19.

t the top of the range, Anthropic would be worth up to $1.405T on a fully diluted basis (think: counting every option and convertible note), up from $965B in its May funding round. Claude was eyeing $2T until, like, five minutes ago, and last week some investors told CNBC that even $1.5T is a “stretch,” which, woof.

Also, perfect timing, too. For instance, last week’s midterms delivered a Democratic sweep in Congress plus a pile of ballot measures that could castrate the AI buildout (think: local data center bans). 

Wall Street is also freaking out about the whole AI trade, worried that rising rates will make debt unaffordable for the AI builders (read: Claude’s landlords). Of course, the business is printing money. Run-rate revenue hit roughly $81B at the end of October, up $10B from September alone. It’s just that a lot of it goes right back out the door on compute.

Not that it’s a pissing contest (spoiler: it’s definitely a pissing contest), but SpaceX raised $85.7B in June and is worth just under $2T. Anthropic’s IPO tops out at $64.35B, which makes it the yugest second-yugest IPO in the history of capitalism.Speaking of the compute guys… AMD, Broadcom, Google, Micron, Microsoft, Nvidia and TSMC agreed to buy another $26B of stock in a private placement at the IPO price, on top of the offering itself. Meaning, the companies selling Claude its chips and cloud are buying its stock so Claude can keep buying their chips and cloud. Define “circle jerk…” Those shares also skip the lock-up, so they can be sold whenever. 

Friendly reminder, Jensen Huang said back in March that Nvidia’s Anthropic investment was probably its last before the IPO. As for Super Dario, he called for slowing down AI development back in September. Then on Monday, right as execs got ready to pitch investors, he woke up and chose safety violence: Anthropic dropped Claude Fable 5.2 and Claude Mythos 5.2, its first frontier models since. Anthropic swears both passed rigorous safety testing. Trust me, bro.

Anthropic is also saving about 20% of shares for retail investors, way more than the usual 5-10%. Per the prospectus, the co-founders want to “bring forth an age of miracles,” and “everyone who owns our stock, whether an institution or an individual, becomes part of that effort.”

Fear not, I’m sure Jensen & Co. would love to make bag holders out of you and me… for the miracles, of course.

Until next time, friends…

At the time of publishing, Stocks.News holds positions in Microsoft and Google as mentioned in the article.