DHAI

By William Gavin

Despite nagging concerns over the AI trade, Anthropic's IPO is reportedly seeing very strong demand

Anthropic, led by Dario Amodei, has kicked off its investor roadshow.

Anthropic's initial public offering may not be as big as investors once hoped, but new signs indicate it won't be a bust, either.

The maker of the Claude chatbot kicked off its roadshow on Tuesday and is expected to launch an IPO that would value it at above $1 trillion as soon as next Thursday. Anthropic (ANT) is reportedly seeing massive demand from investors, with its IPO already multiple times oversubscribed, driven by "anchor-size" indications of interest, according to Bloomberg.

Anthropic on Tuesday said it would seek to raise as much as $62.5 billion from investors, based on its declared IPO price range. The artificial-intelligence lab also plans to raise $26 billion from technology firms, including Nvidia (NVDA) and Micron Technology (MU), and it revealed an option for underwriters to purchase an additional tranche of shares in the IPO.

Its announced range implies a fully diluted valuation of about $1.4 trillion, less than some investors had initially hoped for but one that still puts Anthropic on track for one of the biggest IPOs ever. Morningstar analyst Malik Khan called the company undervalued, pointing out in a note that the deal is being priced during a time of high volatility in the market and general souring on the AI trade.

"Anthropic is going through the last stages of the IPO process, and despite the recent sell-off, a change in the political climate and a potential slowdown in the rollout of data centers, there is still plenty of appetite for a fast-growing and risky asset," Radio Free Mobile analyst Richard Windsor wrote in a note to clients.

Meanwhile, OpenAI has reportedly raised an initial $11 billion as part of a fundraising round that would notch the ChatGPT maker a $1.25 trillion valuation. Greg Brockman, OpenAI's president, said at a conference last week that the company will be IPO ready in 2027.

"We've been very clear this year that we want to go public when we feel is the right time for us, and I feel extremely good about the business," Brockman said at a the Wall Street Journal conference.

Still, OpenAI remains somewhat behind Anthropic, which was created after CEO Dario Amodei and several other leaders left OpenAI to start their own AI company. Anthropic has the lead in the U.S. enterprise market, and its best models top the AI leaderboards.

OpenAI told investors on Tuesday that its revenue grew by about 50% to $10 billion from the second quarter to the third quarter, the Journal reported. That's against an adjusted operating loss of $10.9 billion, compared with $10.1 billion in the prior quarter. It had roughly 100 million users paying for ChatGPT, the report said.

The company didn't immediately respond to a MarketWatch request for comment.

For comparison, Anthropic reported sales of $16.9 billion for the September quarter, up 46% from $11.5 billion a quarter earlier, according to its IPO paperwork. It also posted a third-quarter operating loss of $567 million, compared with operating income of $974 million in the second quarter.

-William Gavin

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11-11-26 1103ET