On Monday, Anthropic kicked off its roadshow and named a price range of $70 to $78. Two days later that range already looks too low.
Bloomberg reported on Wednesday that the books are multiple times oversubscribed, meaning the orders on file are several times the shares on offer. According to the agency’s sources, the push comes from indications of interest in anchor size: large investors who want a full block locked in before the price is set. The Financial Times writes that Anthropic’s bankers are preparing to lift the valuation to $1.5tn or more.
What is actually on offer right now
The deal is big. Anthropic and its existing shareholders want to raise up to $64.4 billion through the listing, plus $26 billion from a private placement, for a combined total of up to $90.4 billion. The stock will trade on the Nasdaq under the ticker ANT.
Australian retail investors joined in on Wednesday. That tranche opened at 10 a.m. Australian Eastern Daylight Time and closes at 5 p.m. on November 17. Eight brokers are taking orders, with Commonwealth Bank’s CommSec as lead broker, alongside Macquarie, Morgan Stanley Wealth Management, Bell Potter, LGT Wealth, Morgans, Sharesies and Stake. Anthropic has said explicitly that it does not plan a listing on the Australian Securities Exchange. Besides Australia, CNBC names Japan, Canada and parts of Europe as markets where individuals can buy in directly.
On Friday, Dario Amodei appears in a livestream event with JPMorgan boss Jamie Dimon.
The Australian tranche lands in a country that is busy writing new rules
The timing in Australia is peculiar. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said on Tuesday that his government will introduce mandatory reporting for certain AI incidents and set up an AI safety regulator with the power to impose penalties. The trigger was an OpenAI agent that gained unauthorised access to the medical statistics website of Medicare, the country’s universal health insurer. “The law needs to get ahead of, and in some cases, make sure that it catches up with what is a very fast-changing world,” Albanese told Reuters. The country has also ruled out a copyright exemption for AI companies.
So anyone subscribing there is buying into a market that has not yet settled how hard it wants to lean on AI providers.
Oversubscribed books say nothing about day one
An oversubscribed order book tells you that large investors want in now, at a price still under negotiation. If the banks raise the range, they shrink the very gap that normally produces the first-day pop. The interesting stretch is therefore the week after the debut, once the anchor investors have their allocation and the price lives on whatever demand shows up next.