Three letters to remember: ANT. It is under this ticker that Anthropic hopes to make its debut on Nasdaq, the American stock exchange that hosts a large share of the tech giants. In a press release published Monday, October 26, the creator of Claude announced that it had filed its Form S-1 with the SEC, the U.S. financial markets regulator.

This document presents the company, its financial statements, and the risks to which its future shareholders will be exposed. Its filing is a step toward an IPO, but several boxes remain to be ticked: neither the number of shares offered nor their price range has been set. The press release also gives no listing date, and the registration is not yet in effect. For comparison, SpaceX began trading on the stock market on June 12, just 23 days after the public filing of its documents on May 20. However, there is no guarantee that Anthropic will follow the same timetable.

The announcement nevertheless opens a new chapter for American AI. After years of private fundraising, one of its leading laboratories is preparing to take its ambitions directly to the market.

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After SpaceX, a bet much more focused on AI

SpaceX’s IPO last June had already set a record: approximately 75 billion dollars (around 67 billion euros) raised, the largest IPO in history. But buying a share in Elon Musk’s company meant betting on several businesses at once: rockets, Starlink, the social network X, and artificial intelligence following the integration of xAI. AI was just one part of a much broader whole.

With Anthropic, the bet would be much more direct. The company’s value depends on its ability to develop increasingly powerful models and sell their use, particularly through Claude and its enterprise tools. Anthropic could thus become the first major US generative AI lab to go public on its own, ahead of OpenAI. This would not, however, be a world first: the Chinese companies Zhipu and MiniMax have already been listed in Hong Kong since January.

Demand for Anthropic shares has, moreover, not waited for this date. In May, tokens issued on the Solana blockchain by the PreStocks platform, intended to provide access to a stake in Anthropic, reached 1,409 dollars per unit (around 1,250 euros).At that price, the market was informally valuing Anthropic at around $1.4 trillion (about €1.25 trillion). Anthropic had then made clear that it did not recognize stock transfers carried out without its authorization. With the IPO, investors will be able to buy shares recognized by Anthropic directly on the Nasdaq, in a regulated environment, with a public share price and financial transparency obligations.

The price range, expected in an amended version of the prospectus, will indicate whether Anthropic is targeting such a valuation once listed on the Nasdaq. At that level of market capitalization, it would move closer to Tesla and Broadcom in the competition for 10th or 11th place among the world’s most highly valued companies.

Anthropic must now convince that it is worth its price

To make its IPO debut, Anthropic has published its financial results. They show that Claude’s customers are spending more and more. In the first half of 2026, Anthropic generated $16.3 billion (about €14.5 billion) in revenue, compared with approximately $1.2 billion a year earlier, according to the prospectus filed with the SEC, whose figures Reuters detailed. The growth is spectacular, admittedly, but the business remained loss-making during that period, with an operating loss of $693 million (about €615 million), compared with $2.14 billion a year earlier.

The filing also shows a net loss of $80.7 billion (about €71.8 billion), including $72.4 billion related to the increase in value of convertible financings convertible into shares.As Anthropic gains value, it also increases the value of the rights granted to its investors. This increase is recorded as an expense, with no cash outflow. Aside from this accounting effect, selling more AI is not yet enough to cover the expenditure required to develop and operate it.

As with SpaceX’s listing, investors are therefore betting on activities that could generate far more than they do today. Claude subscriptions, Starlink subscriptions, and launch contracts are already generating revenue. The question is how far these activities can grow, what profits they will yield, and how much will need to be spent to get there.

Revenue, however, does not by itself determine the value of a company. Nvidia is worth approximately $5.1 trillion on the stock market (about €4.54 trillion), compared with $2.68 trillion for Amazon (about €2.39 trillion), almost twice as much. Yet the chipmaker generated $216 billion in revenue (about €192 billion) in the fiscal year ended January 2026, compared with $717 billion for Amazon (about €638 billion) in 2025—sales more than three times lower.

On this point, Anthropic will still have to make a convincing case.Demand for its tools is rising rapidly, but it must continue to fund its infrastructure and upcoming models while facing competitors seeking the same customers (such as Google, OpenAI, Microsoft, Meta, xAI, etc.). Such a high valuation leaves little room for disappointing growth, especially given this competition.

This IPO also comes at a time when Anthropic itself acknowledges that its technology could pose “catastrophic or existential” risks to humanity. Its share price will also weigh on the resources it has pledged to cushion the economic disruptions it anticipates.

Subject to shareholder approval, the company wishes to allocate 5% of its capital to a fund that could help people whose jobs could be made precarious by AI. Since this allocation would take the form of shares, it could gain value if their share price rises or lose value if it falls. Anthropic has not yet detailed the terms of the assistance.

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