Anthropic IPO: $69.3 billion on the table, then backpedaling

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The calendar still holds according to the Wall Street Journal with a first session scheduled for Thursday November 19 or Friday November 20 under the ticker ANT. The doubts of major investors about the valuation were therefore not enough to postpone the operation.

The document details a two-stage operation. On the one hand, 866.7 million shares offered to the public between 70 and 80 dollars. On the other, a private placement of $26 billion at the IPO price, reserved for Google, Nvidia, AMD, Broadcom, Micron, Microsoft and TSMC. In other words, the chip and cloud suppliers that Anthropic already pays billions for. The fully diluted valuation would be between $1,270 billion and $1,450 billion.

These amounts are lower than what was circulating a month ago. At the beginning of October we were talking about 2,000 billion valuation and 80 to 100 billion raised. The Nasdaq lost almost 5% last week and 2.5 trillion in capitalization in a single session on November 5. Three major investors then told the Wall Street Journal that they would not follow at $1.5 trillion. The $70-$80 range answers that message.

And then the email. Reuters reports that Anthropic wrote to its bankers that the filing included incorrect figures and that an update would follow. The company has not commented. Impossible to know this morning if it is the range, the number of shares or the amount of the private placement that jumps.

The Wall Street Journal maintains that the official range is expected to be set this week and that the stock will begin trading on Thursday or Friday of next week. The soap opera has already slipped twice. A roadshow announced for mid-October was postponed until after the midterms, then the hoped-for start for the week of November 9 was called into question by the fall in AI values. On Monday the Nasdaq regained 2.75% while Nvidia lost 4.3%, weighed down by the investigation by its board of directors into Jensen Huang.

The previous OpenAI also weighs. The rival completed a first round last week of $11 billion at a valuation of $1.25 trillion, far from the envelope it was targeting. Anthropic therefore arrives in a market where even the other generative AI giant did not get what it asked for.

Machine-translated from French