Anthropic's stock market debut is set to be big — a big valuation, big spending, big warnings, big uncertainty for investors and a big potential indicator of how the recently volatile artificial intelligence sector will fare in 2027.
In an amended U.S. regulatory filing Tuesday, San Francisco-based Anthropic set an expected initial public offering (IPO) price range of $70 US to $78 US per share. That implies a fully diluted market valuation of roughly $1.3 trillion US at the midpoint, climbing to $1.4 trillion US at the top end, marking the largest technology stock market debut on record.
"It's going to be one of the biggest IPOs in history," said Greg Taylor, portfolio manager at Vancouver-based PenderFund Capital Management.
The size of an IPO is typically measured by the amount of capital raised. Anthropic is aiming to raise up to $64.4 billion US directly through its public share offering. If that happens, it will rank behind only SpaceX's record-setting stock market launch in June.
Taylor expects Anthropic shares will start trading before the U.S. celebrates Thanksgiving, on Nov. 26. Wealthsimple, the popular Canadian financial trading app, lists an expected "IPO day" of Nov. 30.
Ernest Wong, head of research at Toronto-based Baskin Wealth Management, anticipates the stock will be a serious heavyweight when it starts trading on the Nasdaq exchange.
"There are only a handful of stocks in the world that are valued over $1 trillion US," he said. "It speaks to how big AI really is."
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Anthropic started as a niche AI research lab in 2021, when its founders left rival OpenAI because they felt it was too focused on profits, ignoring risks and giving too much control to investors.
The company gained momentum in 2024, when it released Claude 3.5 Sonnet. This version beat OpenAI's GPT-4o on major performance benchmarks at a fraction of the cost of previous frontier AI models.
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Unlike Apple or Microsoft, Anthropic is not a traditional for-profit company. It's organized as a public benefit corporation, meaning its board has a legal mandate to balance public safety against maximizing shareholder returns.
Today, Anthropic's CEO Dario Amodei is a leading advocate for AI safety, arguing the industry should slow development to let safety measures catch up.
In Anthropic's recent regulatory filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, 94 of more than 300 pages were dedicated to spelling out a long list of risk factors.
"Our AI models may behave in unintended, misaligned, or autonomous ways, including by taking harmful actions that no user or third party directed," the company stated.
Anthropic says this may include, "behavior resembling blackmail or efforts to influence human decision-makers to preserve the model's continued operation," as well as actions that "pose catastrophic or existential risks to humanity."
$1.4 trillion US is not the only eyebrow-raising figure associated with Anthropic's IPO.
The company's valuation has fluctuated wildly in recent months. $2 trillion US was recently on the table. In late May, private investors valued the company at $965 billion US, up from $380 billion US in February.
"There's a fairly big degree of optimism baked into these valuations as they're coming out," Taylor said.
"I don't think…
