Anthropic Just Filed. The Cheap Shares Were Sold Months Ago.

On Monday, Anthropic made its IPO filing public. The company plans to list on Nasdaq under the ticker ANT, is expected to debut before Thanksgiving, and reported about $16.3 billion of revenue in the first half of 2026 against a net loss of $80.7 billion, most of it from a rise in the fair value of bonds convertible into its shares. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley lead the deal alongside 20 other underwriters, and the offering could surpass SpaceX's record June raise, which Al Jazeera put at $86 billion.¹ The filing left two things blank: the number of shares and the price range.¹ Fortune has reported a target of Thanksgiving week, starting November 23, and a valuation goal of $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion.²

That blank is the point. Until the banks fill it in, there is no public price for Anthropic. There has, however, been a private one all year, and it has moved a long way.

The private trade happened first

In February, Bloomberg reported that Anthropic planned to let current and former employees sell $5 billion to $6 billion of stock to outside investors at a valuation of about $350 billion, just below the $380 billion post-money value of the funding round it had closed earlier that month.³ The sale was completed at $350 billion but came in under the $6 billion investors had lined up, because employees chose to sell fewer shares than expected.⁴

They had reason to hold. By April 23 the chief executive of Forge Global, a marketplace for private shares, said Anthropic was trading on his platform at an implied valuation of roughly $1 trillion, more than double its last primary round. One broker described a bid at $960 billion that was taken by another buyer before he could evaluate it. Another said a shareholder had offered to sell at $1.15 trillion. Glen Anderson of Rainmaker Securities put the mood plainly: “It's almost less about the return than being able to say they're an Anthropic investor.”⁵

In late May the company closed a $65 billion Series H at a $965 billion valuation, co-led by Capital Group and Singapore's GIC.⁶ By this week, Reuters reported, current and prospective investors were valuing the company at about $1.5 trillion, down from roughly $2 trillion a week earlier after financial disclosures at an investor event.¹

Read those prices in order: $350 billion in a February tender, about $1 trillion on a secondary platform in April, $965 billion in a May primary round, $1.5 trillion in talk this week. Every one of those trades was private. Every one happened before a single retail order could be entered.

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Who got in, and how

Access ran through narrow doors. Buyers on a board-approved secondary must be accredited, which for an individual means $200,000 of income for two years, $300,000 jointly, or $1 million of net worth outside a primary residence. Hiive data put the share price above $849 in mid-April. Anyone who gets in before the listing also faces a standard 180-day lock-up afterward.⁷

Demand ran far ahead of supply. By early June intermediaries said they were being inundated with requests from family offices, and PitchBook data showed secondary transactions through one SPV platform, Sydecar, up 682% from 2023 levels. Cambridge Associates warned in late May that much of the upside in these companies will likely have accrued to earlier private investors by the time they list.⁶

Anthropic itself drew a hard line. On May 12 it updated its policy to say that any sale or transfer of its stock without board approval is “void” and the buyer will not be recognized as a shareholder, named a list of platforms it considers unauthorized, and flagged new offerings on Forge Global and Hiive. A token tied to Anthropic shares on a Solana-based platform fell from $1,400 to $900 after the announcement.⁸ In the company's own words: “Offers investing in Anthropic's past or future financing rounds through an SPV are prohibited.”⁶

The public wrappers have their own problem. Destiny Tech100, a listed fund that reported adding $100 million of Anthropic exposure in February, traded at $40.06 on the day SpaceX listed, roughly double its net asset value.⁹ On Monday it closed at $28.11 against a last reported net asset value of $34.30, a discount of about 20%.¹⁰ The underlying companies went up. The wrapper went from a premium to a discount.

What SpaceX taught in four months

SpaceX priced its IPO at $135 on June 11. The stock opened at $150 the next morning, touched $174.99 around 1 p.m. and closed at $160.95, a 19.2% first-day gain on more than 503 million shares traded.¹¹ That was the day most investors got their first chance to buy.

By August 5 the stock closed at $108, about 20% below the IPO price and far below that first-day high. It had recovered to about $163 by October 12, through six insider share unlocks covering roughly 2.3 billion shares.¹² The biggest one, up to 1.3 billion shares worth about $200 billion, became eligible last Thursday, two days after SpaceX reported third-quarter revenue of $14.58 billion and net income of $4.4 billion, and another 328 million shares followed on Monday.¹³ A further 797.6 million become eligible after December 8.¹²

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The people who did well in SpaceX were the ones who owned it before June 12. The people who bought at the opening print were underwater by August 5, and anyone who bought near the afternoon high was still underwater in mid-October.¹² An IPO pop is not a gift to new buyers. It is the moment the earliest holders find out what their shares are worth to the public.

An IPO pop is not a gift to new buyers. It is the moment the earliest holders find out what their shares are worth to the public.

Why the opening bell is rarely the bargain

The reasons are structural. Banks set an IPO price to clear a book of institutional orders, not to find a bargain for the public. Early holders face lock-ups, so the supply that would push the price down arrives in stages after the listing, as SpaceX's unlock calendar shows.¹² And the private rounds have already set a floor the public price must justify. In Anthropic's case that floor moved from $350 billion to roughly $1.5 trillion in eight months.^4, 1

Even the competition concedes the position. Elon Musk, whose own AI lab competes with Anthropic, told Cursor employees at an all-hands in August that Anthropic is the current leader in AI, according to a report in The Information.¹⁴ In interview remarks posted to X on September 26 he went further: “We've only been around about three years doing AI…Anthropic's been around for six years,” adding, “I would expect that we probably catch up to frontier…”¹⁵

None of this makes Anthropic a safe trade at any price. The company lost $80.7 billion in six months on paper, says compute will remain its largest expense for the foreseeable future, and has not set a price. A $1.5 trillion valuation that was $2 trillion a week earlier can move again.¹ OpenAI is negotiating a raise of up to $30 billion at a $1.25 trillion pre-money valuation with its own confidential filing already in.¹⁶ And the pre-IPO market is full of vehicles the company says it will not honor.⁸

But the sequence is the lesson, not the ticker. Private investors set the price at $350 billion, then $965 billion, then more. The public will be invited in at whatever the banks decide in November, and the chart that follows is likely to look like every other hot listing: a pop, a slide as lock-ups open, and a long argument about what it was ever worth. The investors who did best in SpaceX did not wait for the bell. The question for Anthropic is whether there is still a way in before it rings.