Anthropic, the artificial intelligence company behind the Claude chatbot, has set a price range of $70 to $78 a share for its Nasdaq listing and expects to raise up to $64 billion — a flotation that could value it at around $1.3 trillion.

The company will list under the symbol ANT on 19 November, the BBC reported. It will be the first fully AI-focused company to go public, which makes the listing a test case for investor appetite in the sector.

The numbers, and a disagreement about them

Anthropic’s own results for the six months to the end of June show revenue of $16.2 billion, up from $1.1 billion in the same period a year earlier — close to a fifteen-fold increase.

Over the same six months its pre-tax loss widened to $80.7 billion from $12.9 billion. The BBC attributes the scale of those losses to the cost of the data centres, computing systems and other infrastructure required to develop AI models. Hiru News, which carried the story in Sri Lanka and credited the BBC, reproduces the same revenue and loss figures.

The two accounts diverge on what the share range implies. The BBC puts the resulting valuation at between $1.1 trillion and $1.3 trillion, and notes that even the upper end is below the $2 trillion some of the company’s backers predicted in the summer, according to the Financial Times. Hiru News puts the range higher, at $1.3 trillion to $1.4 trillion, attributing that figure to foreign media reports. Neither filing explains the difference. This report uses the BBC’s range, as the account closer to the company’s own disclosure.

For scale, the BBC notes that at $1.3 trillion Anthropic would still be worth less than SpaceX, which listed in June at a valuation of nearly $1.8 trillion.

Listing into a nervous market

The flotation arrives at an unsettled moment for large technology stocks. The BBC reports that the Nasdaq fell sharply after last week’s US midterm elections on concerns that a Democrat-led Congress could slow AI development and the build-out of data centres, against a wider backdrop of doubt about whether the sums being spent on AI will ever pay off.

Fiona Cincotta, a senior market analyst at City Index, described the $64 billion target as “fairly bullish” given “the volatility [and] concerns towards AI that we’ve seen in sort of particularly last week.” She told Reuters the size of the raise showed the company and its bankers “are still sort of upbeat about the outlook as far as AI is concerned and that obviously that they think that the demand is going to be there.”

The valuation also sits awkwardly beside the company’s own public position on the technology. Anthropic warned last month that AI could pose “catastrophic or existential risks to humanity”, a warning both the BBC and Hiru News place directly against the size of the listing.

Background

Anthropic is five years old. It was co-founded in 2021 by the siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei together with five others, all of whom had worked at OpenAI, the rival behind ChatGPT. Anthropic announced its intention to list in June and OpenAI followed; that listing is now expected early next year.

Disclosure: LankaNewz articles are produced using Anthropic’s Claude model. This report is drawn entirely from the two sources linked above.

Not reported

Neither filing gives the number of shares on offer, the split between new shares and those sold by existing holders, the banks running the offering, or what proportion of the company is being floated. Neither states when pricing occurs, as distinct from the first day of trading. Nothing in either account breaks the $80.7 billion pre-tax loss into cash costs and non-cash charges — a distinction that matters a great deal in reading a loss roughly five times revenue — and neither reports Anthropic’s cash position or expected use of proceeds.