Anthropic’s initial public offering drew about six times the orders for the shares available, Bloomberg reported on Friday, hours after chief executive Dario Amodei joined JPMorgan Chase chief Jamie Dimon for a livestreamed fireside chat and said he hopes the company will “underpromise and overdeliver.”

The demand, reported by Bloomberg, puts Anthropic on course for what would be the largest listing of all time, bigger than SpaceX’s IPO. Anthropic and its co-founders are seeking to raise as much as $64.4 billion in the IPO, plus $26 billion in a concurrent private placement, according to the company’s filings.

What Amodei told Dimon

Amodei spoke to Dimon at noon Eastern time on Friday at JPMorgan’s Manhattan headquarters, in front of an audience of existing and prospective Anthropic investors, the company’s chief financial officer Krishna Rao, and Amodei’s wife, Cami Clark, the Wall Street Journal reported. JPMorgan is one of more than 20 underwriters on the deal, with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley leading the offering.

Asked about the IPO, Amodei said he hopes the company will “underpromise and overdeliver.” He told Dimon the company is “not super fussed on when exactly, what month, what market conditions we go public into,” and said he has been advised throughout the process to “never let your company be worth a single dollar more than it’s really worth.”

Amodei also called investing in computing power the “deepest business dilemma that the company faces,” given the massive investment required and the unpredictability of revenue, Bloomberg reported. The remark captures the central tension of the offering: Anthropic must fund enormous compute spending to stay in the frontier race, while its revenue growth has repeatedly outrun its own forecasts.

Anthropic IPO in numbers: 6x oversubscribed, $64.4 billion maximum raise, $81 billion revenue run rate, about $1.4 trillion fully diluted valuation
The Anthropic IPO in numbers. Graphic: GPTOnline, based on Bloomberg reporting and Anthropic’s November 10 filing.

The numbers behind the demand

Anthropic plans to sell 825 million shares at $70 to $78 a share, with pricing set for November 18 and trading expected to begin Thursday, November 19, on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker ANT. The company is targeting a fully diluted valuation of about $1.4 trillion, Bloomberg reported, while the Journal put the target at roughly $1.33 trillion or more.

Demand is running ahead of supply. Bankers have told prospective investors that existing backers will be prioritised, and some would-be buyers will receive smaller allocations than they expect, according to sources familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified because the information is not public. Details of the offering, including the demand for shares, could still change.

The chipmaker Nvidia has agreed to buy about $10 billion worth of shares as part of the $26 billion private placement, the filings show. Anthropic counts Nvidia as a strategic partner and has committed tens of billions of dollars to deals securing access to its most advanced chips.

The company’s November 10 filing also supported the case for AI spending. Anthropic reported a revenue run rate of $81 billion as of October 31, up $10 billion from the end of September. The figure stood at $65 billion at the end of July. Anthropic defines the metric as annualising consumption-based fees for a trailing 28-day period and subscription-based fees for a single month.

Anthropic IPO timeline: S-1 filing November 10, fireside chat November 13, pricing November 18, first trading November 19
From filing to first trading: the Anthropic IPO calendar. Graphic: GPTOnline.

Why it matters

The surge of interest in Anthropic shares contrasts with investors pulling back support for Nvidia after chief executive Jensen Huang was ousted from his post, Bloomberg noted. The contrast underlines how quickly sentiment in the AI complex can split between the model makers and the chip supplier that powers them.

For Anthropic, the roadshow is also a public test of its pitch that AI spending will keep compounding. A sixfold oversubscription, if it holds into pricing, gives the company room to set terms with confidence. But the same filing that shows an $81 billion run rate also shows a business whose largest cost, compute, must be committed years in advance, which is exactly the dilemma Amodei described to Dimon.

Dimon has lent his stage to a blockbuster listing before, pitching the SpaceX deal at JPMorgan’s headquarters earlier this year, in an event Bloomberg described as more extravagant than Friday’s more subdued conversation. Anthropic’s event, by contrast, was framed as part of a campaign of investor events ahead of a listing that could arrive before the US Thanksgiving holiday.

Anthropic launched the roadshow earlier this week, with the offering structured around the 825 million shares and the $26 billion private placement. Pricing on November 18 will show whether the demand reported on Friday translates into a final price at the top of the range.

Sources