At the beginning of 2023, Anthropic had not yet launched Claude, its flagship product. Few people could have imagined that, within just a few years, it would become a leading contender for one of the most significant IPOs (initial public offerings, or stock market listings) in the tech sector. Yet that is what could happen: according to media reports, including those published by CNN, the company is aiming to raise between $60 billion and $100 billion, at a valuation of more than $2 trillion.
To put this into perspective, Apple took 44 years to surpass a market capitalisation of $2 trillion (source: Business Today), while Alphabet, Google’s parent company, took around 26 years (source: Advisor Perspectives). Founded in 2021, Anthropic could get there in just five years. In May, its latest private funding round valued the company at $965 billion; in June, SpaceX went public at a valuation of $1.77 trillion, raising around $86 billion (source: S&P Global) and setting the current record.
If you hadn’t noticed, we live in an era of accelerating change, and market cycles reflect this pace too. Anthropic, a company whose mission is to accelerate humanity’s future, is an emblematic example of this period of rapid, disruptive innovation.
The IPO date has not yet been officially announced, but the latest reports suggest a listing after the US midterm elections on 3 November. The potential listing would nevertheless be a significant moment for markets because, for the first time, generative Artificial Intelligence (AI), until now funded by venture capital and technology giants, would be exposed directly and on a large scale to the judgement of public-market investors. In this article, we explore the potential implications of the IPO for investors’ portfolios.
Born out of OpenAI
Anthropic’s story begins with a split. At the end of 2020, Dario Amodei, OpenAI’s Vice President of Research and one of the key figures behind GPT-2 and GPT-3, left the company alongside his sister Daniela and a group of senior colleagues. The disagreement centred on the direction OpenAI had taken following Microsoft’s 2019 investment: a stronger focus on commercialisation, which would accelerate the development of increasingly powerful models. Anthropic was founded on these principles.
In its early years, the company operated more like a research centre than a commercial business. Significant funding followed in 2021, with a $124 million round led by Jaan Tallinn, Skype’s co-founder, which also included former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. As reported by TechCrunch, one of Anthropic’s early backers was Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of FTX, the cryptocurrency company that went into liquidation following one of the largest bankruptcies in modern history. He invested around $500 million shortly before his company collapsed. That stake was sold by the liquidators in 2024 for just over $1 billion and would probably be worth tens of billions of dollars today. By the summer of the same year, Anthropic already had a chatbot prototype but chose not to release it; in November, ChatGPT became a global phenomenon.
Claude arrived in March 2023. Amazon subsequently invested up to $8 billion in the company by 2024, followed by Google. Both also became key suppliers of computing power. Another important development came in software development: with Claude Code, launched in 2025, developers began delegating entire blocks of work to AI, and Claude became a go-to tool for businesses. In August 2025, 43.8% of the more than 70,000 US businesses using the multinational fintech company Ramp were paying for Anthropic’s services. The figure comes from the Ramp AI Index, which Ramp compiles using its customers’ transaction data.
What media reports suggest
According to those familiar with it, the approximately 300-page prospectus whose contents were leaked to Reuters is an unusual document. Alongside its growth ambitions, around 80 pages are reportedly devoted to warning about the risks of the technology. The document cited by Reuters warns that AI could have catastrophic, or even existential, consequences for humanity. It is rare for a public offering to describe the dangers of its own product so openly.
The central theme reflects the paradox at the heart of Anthropic’s mission. The company argues that making AI safer requires making it more powerful, because only advanced AI can counter the threats generated by AI itself. Yet more powerful AI is also less predictable. The prospectus describes controlled tests in which more autonomous models sabotaged code, assisted fraud and manipulated information. It even refers to behaviours described as “self-preservation”, such as attempts to resist being switched off or actions resembling blackmail. Despite these findings, the company continues to maintain that its primary goal is to build safe AI.
The second notable aspect of the document concerns the scale of the company’s operations and costs. Anthropic reportedly has commitments totalling $518 billion for cloud services, chips and infrastructure over the coming years, against revenue of around $4.6 billion in 2025. According to Reuters, the company has signed agreements with suppliers that would require it to pay for this capacity even if it did not use it. It ended 2025 with a net loss of $42 billion, although around $34 billion of this was an accounting charge related to convertible instruments rather than a cash outflow. In short, frontier AI is an extremely capital-intensive industry, more akin to railways or energy than traditional software. The sustainability of its business model depends on revenue continuing to grow, and the proceeds from the IPO would also help ease this pressure.
The third point concerns governance. According to reports, following the listing, four of the seven board members would be appointed by the Long-Term Benefit Trust, an independent body whose members do not hold shares in the company. Meanwhile, the seven co-founders, through a single Class F share, would control 50.1% of the votes on key decisions. Anyone buying Anthropic shares would therefore participate in its financial performance, but not in its decision-making. This is not unique: Meta and Alphabet, for example, are also founder-controlled. However, Anthropic’s control structure would be even more tightly entrenched and remains a factor worth considering.
A business model focused more on B2B than B2C
Despite the chatbot’s public profile, Anthropic is primarily a business-to-business provider. Public information about its revenue is still incomplete, however, and the figures below are estimates based on media reports and market data published by third-party sources, including Reuters. In 2025, revenue reportedly rose from $386 million to around $4.6 billion, a twelvefold increase. In the second quarter of 2026, it is said to have reached approximately $11.5 billion in just three months.
| Revenue stream | Estimated 2025 revenue | How it works |
| APIs (model usage) | $3.2bn | Businesses integrate Claude into their products and pay according to usage |
| Consumer subscriptions | $924m | An average of 3.5 million paying subscribers at $22 per month |
| Business subscriptions | $403m | An average of 1.2 million business licences at $28 per month |
The core of the business model is therefore the API: the channel through which other companies integrate Claude into their software and services. In 2025, this reportedly accounted for more than two-thirds of revenue. Subscriptions, taken together, are estimated to have generated around $1.3 billion.
One area of concern is customer concentration: almost a quarter of 2025 revenue reportedly came from just two customers. According to market analysis, these were mainly large technology companies’ cloud services, which resell access to the models and retain a commission. Reuters reports that sales through major technology partners (Amazon, Google, Broadcom and Microsoft) accounted for 47% of 2025 revenue. This is an efficient distribution channel, but it also ties Anthropic to partners that may simultaneously be shareholders, suppliers and, to some extent, competitors.
What to expect from the indices: the mechanics of a listing
When a company of this size enters the market, investors using diversified index-based strategies need to consider technical factors as well as the company’s fundamentals. In the first few weeks, the share price could be driven more by flows than by fundamentals.
If Anthropic listed on Nasdaq, it could enter the Nasdaq-100 relatively quickly. Under the index’s rules, an IPO that ranks among the 40 largest companies by market capitalisation can be included after just 15 trading sessions (fast entry rule). Anthropic would comfortably exceed this threshold. This means that instruments such as ETFs and index funds would need to buy shares to replicate the index.
Anthropic’s initial weighting in the index would not be based on its total market capitalisation alone, but on the shares actually offered to the market, multiplied by three. With $100 billion raised, the relevant value would be $300 billion, equivalent to around 1% of an index worth $31 trillion.
A broad ecosystem of ETFs and other financial instruments is built around the Nasdaq-100. Anthropic’s potential inclusion in the index could therefore trigger purchases by funds that track it, creating additional demand for the shares around the time of its entry. The scale of these flows would depend on the weighting assigned to the company and on the assets directly tracking the index. This demand could support the share price temporarily, but it would not guarantee a lasting advantage.
Markets tend to anticipate such predictable flows and, once they have run their course, the share price returns to being driven by earnings and expectations. This upward pressure could also be partly offset by sales of other Big Tech stocks, which would be needed to make room for the new constituent. For investors, the key point is that any short-term price impact is difficult to predict and may prove temporary. A diversified portfolio can help reduce reliance on any single stock or market event, keeping the focus on longer-term investment objectives.
Long-term implications for investors
In the long term, much will depend on the company’s ability to generate revenue. The broader question is whether we are witnessing the emergence of a new generation of mega-cap companies that could offer greater diversification, even within a concentrated market, and influence market dynamics as we have seen over the past 20 years.
The internet revolution shows that this process is rarely straightforward. The Nasdaq Composite peaked in March 2000 before suffering a sharp decline. Many of the companies at the centre of the dot-com bubble disappeared, while a small number of winners generated much of the value. Yet investors who stayed invested over the long term were able to benefit from some of the most rewarding periods of equity-market growth in history.
From a historical perspective, maintaining a diversified portfolio over the long term is one way to manage the volatility associated with major technological trends. The direction of the global economy may seem clear, but the journey could still hold surprises. The evolution of markets and technology will continue to require careful monitoring of risks.
For investors interested in this IPO, Anthropic shares will be available on the Moneyfarm Do-it-yourself (DIY) platform from the first day of listing*.
Please remember that when investing, your capital is at risk. The value of your portfolio with Moneyfarm can go down as well as up and you may get back less than you invest. Past performance is not a reliable indicator of future performance. The views expressed here should not be taken as a recommendation, advice or forecast. Investing is usually for the long term, but it depends on the circumstances of each individual. If you are unsure investing is the right choice for you, please seek financial advice.
*The availability of the stock from the first day of listing is subject to operational and market conditions.
*As with all investing, financial instruments involve inherent risks, including loss of capital, market fluctuations and liquidity risk. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. It is important to consider your risk tolerance and investment objectives before proceeding.
