Anthropic IPO to test the first 'pure play' AI stock in a choppy market

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 America 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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What is Anthropic?

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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  Will Anthropic's IPO go boom or bust?

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."

Big numbers

$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 anyone can tell you what Anthropic is gonna look like five years out."

Dario Amodei, CEO and co-founder of Anthropic, attends the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January 2025. (Markus Schreiber/The Associated Press)

The company's sales have been brisk. According to regulatory filings, Anthropic earned more than three and a half times as much revenue in the first six months of 2026 as it did in the entire previous calendar year. Roughly 20 per cent of those sales came from two big unnamed customers.

At the same time, the AI giant has been spilling a lot of red ink. It booked a $80.7 billion US net loss this year through June, although this was mainly due to non-cash accounting charges. The company lost $42 billion US in 2025.

Anthropic also has big spending plans. The company does not build or own physical data centres. Instead, it rents high-performance computing power from cloud providers like Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud through massive multi-year service contracts.

According to regulatory filings, Anthropic has locked in nearly $900 billion US in cloud and computing deals that run through the 2030s and 2040s. Partners in these deals include Broadcom, SpaceX AI, Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft Azure.

A blockbuster IPO

Anthropic's IPO isn't noteworthy for its massive size alone. 

"Buying the Anthropic IPO is one of the first pure play AI investments out there," Taylor said. 

Until now, investors looking to own a piece of the artificial intelligence boom have been mainly limited to far less AI-focused technology stocks such as Microsoft or Nvidia, which makes chips. Google, for example, is widely-considered part of the AI investment theme. But the company also has massive businesses unrelated to AI, like its Android smartphones, and YouTube.

"The only thing they do is create new AI models," Wong said of Anthropic. "It's certainly a missing piece of the puzzle, in the sense that you have the public company data from all of the various players that are involved in AI, except for the model companies, which are largely Anthropic and OpenAI."

If Anthropic's IPO is seen as a new benchmark for AI investment, its first trading sessions will come amid significant volatility for the technology sector. 

Earlier this month, tech and AI stocks experienced sharp sell-offs and swift rebounds as markets entered correction territory. This was due in part to concerns about AI companies matching their big spending with sufficient profits. The situation was compounded by political concerns in the U.S. after the midterms about tighter regulation for AI and data centres.

At the same time, the recent scandal involving Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang's alleged relationship with a suspected Chinese spy adds a new dimension to AI investment concerns. The chipmaker's stock, seen as a bellwether for the AI trade, has erased billions in market capitalization in recent days on the Nasdaq, where Anthropic is set to debut.

Like the dot com bubble?

"The main risk for Anthropic is that essentially they have to compete with other model providers. It's a very competitive market," Wong said.  "OpenAI makes their own models. SpaceX through Grok is a leading model lab. Certainly, Google and Meta are competing in this space."

He predicts the stock won't be for the faint of heart early on, as investors rank each new Anthropic product against peers and evaluate it's huge spending on data services.

"It'll be very volatile," Wong said.

Such has been the case with SpaceX since its Nasdaq debut in June. The stock surged about 19 per cent on day one. Since then, it's dipped as much as 22 per cent below its $135 US IPO price.

For Taylor, the AI sector's massive spending, blistering stock run-ups and tight business links between a handful of tech companies are all reminders of a previous investment frenzy that separated winners from losers in spectacular fashion.

"The dot-com bubble is certainly the one that's probably most real in a lot of people's minds," he said. "Everyone wanted a piece of the internet back in 2000." 

While companies like Pets.com went bust, Google and Microsoft became household names. 

"There's a lot of big parallels here with AI," Taylor said. "It's just figuring out who's going to win at the end of the day."