Anthropic Just Filed to Go Public. Remember What Happened to SpaceX.

On Monday, Anthropic made it official. The company behind the Claude AI models filed publicly to list its shares on Nasdaq under the ticker ANT, with the offering expected before Thanksgiving.¹ According to Bloomberg, it could begin marketing the deal to investors as soon as the week of November 9, and it expects the offering to match or beat the size of SpaceX’s record listing in June.²

The filing gives the public its first full look at the company’s books. Revenue for the first half of 2026 was about $16.3 billion. It also showed a net loss of $80.7 billion, most of it from changes in the fair value of convertible bonds rather than from running the business. The filing did not include a share count or a price range.¹ Those numbers explain both the excitement and the risk. The revenue shows a business growing very quickly. The losses, even if most are accounting entries, show how expensive it is to stay at the frontier of AI.

The valuation is moving fast. Anthropic was valued at $965 billion after a $65 billion funding round in May.³ Reuters reported that some investors now value it at about $1.5 trillion, down from about $2 trillion just a week earlier.¹

The wave is bigger than one company

Anthropic is not alone. OpenAI filed confidentially for its own listing in June, and is now negotiating up to $30 billion of private funding at a pre-money valuation of $1.25 trillion, up from an $852 billion post-money valuation in March.⁴ SpaceX already went public in June. Between them, these three companies represent the biggest wave of new stock the market has seen in years. And once listed, these companies tend to land in the big indexes quickly. SpaceX joined the Nasdaq-100 less than a month after its debut.⁵

For ordinary investors, that sounds like a chance finally to own the companies they read about every day. It is. But SpaceX has just given everyone a lesson in how expensive that chance can be.

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What SpaceX taught first-day buyers

SpaceX opened its first day of trading at $150, 11.1% above its offering price. It ran as high as $174.99 before closing at $160.95, up 19.2%.⁶ Six days later it was at $185. Then it fell. By July 21 the shares were at $123.54, a drop of a third in barely a month.⁷

Investors who got shares at the offering price did fine. Most individual investors did not get shares at the offering price. They bought on the open market, in the excitement of the first days, and spent the summer underwater.

The pattern is common with big, heavily promoted listings. Demand from investors who could not get an allocation arrives all at once on the first day, and as the excitement fades over the following weeks, the price often fades with it.

The hardest part of a hot IPO is not getting in. It is getting in at a price that leaves room to make money. The first day of trading is usually when demand is highest and supply is lowest, which is the worst combination for a buyer.

The hardest part of a hot IPO is not getting in. It is getting in at a price that leaves room to make money.

Even the backdoor got crowded

Some investors tried to get around this by buying publicly traded funds that held SpaceX before it listed. That did not always work either. One closed-end fund holding pre-IPO tech companies traded at roughly a 100% premium to the value of its holdings in June, at about $40 a share, as SpaceX prepared to list.⁸ By October 26 the same fund was at $28.11, below its last reported net asset value of $34.30, as of June 30.⁹ The fund was priced as if the best possible outcome were already guaranteed.

In other words, investors paid twice what the underlying assets were worth for the privilege of early access, and then watched the premium vanish. The idea was right. The route was too crowded, and too expensive. That is the trap of trying to buy access to something everyone wants. When demand is that obvious, the price of access rises until most of the profit is gone.

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A better question for the AI IPO wave

That is the lesson to carry into Anthropic’s listing. The question is not whether the company is important. It plainly is. The question is whether there is a simpler, cheaper way to benefit from its debut than fighting the crowd on day one or paying a fat premium for a fund.

The timing adds pressure. The Federal Reserve announces its rate decision on Wednesday. After a hike in September, markets expect it to hold this week, with another increase seen as likely in December.¹⁰ Rising rates tend to be hard on richly valued growth stocks, and new listings are among the most richly valued of all.

SpaceX showed how sensitive new listings can be: by early August its shares closed at $108, well below where many first-week buyers had paid.¹¹

There are other ways to position. Some publicly traded companies stand to benefit directly when a giant like Anthropic or SpaceX comes to market, and they can be bought today in an ordinary brokerage account, without an allocation, a premium or a first-day scramble. Finding them takes work, which is exactly why few investors bother. The point is not to avoid the AI IPO wave. It is to avoid paying the crowd’s price for it.

The AI IPO wave is coming whether or not individual investors are ready for it. SpaceX showed that being early to the idea is not enough. The investors who do best will be the ones who are early to the right trade. Anthropic’s marketing could begin within two weeks.² That leaves a short window to think clearly before the excitement starts.