Anthropic retracts IPO pricing that pointed to $69.3B

Late on Monday, November 9, Anthropic emailed bankers a copy of its IPO filing pricing about 867 million shares at $70 to $80 each, then sent a follow-up saying the pricing details were inaccurate, Reuters reported, citing the emails. The $69.3 billion raise in the headlines is the top of that range, so it is a number Anthropic itself has pulled, and the company said the correct terms would come in an updated filing.

At the $70 end, the same share count would raise about $60.7 billion. Bloomberg called it a brief clerical misstep in which a leaked prospectus mistakenly dangled the $69.3 billion target, and said the company reportedly described the number as outdated. The emails Reuters saw use the word inaccurate.

The figure also undercuts the deal’s earlier ambitions. Bloomberg said $69.3 billion would fall short of an earlier goal of matching SpaceX’s record-setting debut, and that formal marketing of the offering could start as early as Tuesday. In early November, The Wall Street Journal reported that the IPO had been expected to raise up to $100 billion at a valuation of around $1.5 trillion; the withdrawn top of the range already sits about $31 billion below that.

Until the updated filing lands, the valuation numbers in circulation are outside estimates. The $1.5 trillion figure attached to the deal is one of them, and several analysts are questioning it. For scale, Anthropic’s last private round, a $65 billion Series H, valued it at $965 billion post-money, per Tracxn.

Michael Burry, who has been betting against AI stocks, wrote in a Substack post that the filing shows the AI industry is “catastrophically vulnerable”. He pointed to deals to buy about $537 billion of compute from Amazon, Alphabet and Microsoft, plus preliminary agreements worth hundreds of billions more with others such as SpaceXAI. Burry put Anthropic’s total commitments at about 12 times its current annual run-rate revenue. “This is not stated clearly in the S-1, and in my view it is the most deserved headline from it,” he wrote.

Aswath Damodaran first valued Anthropic at $1.475 trillion, just below the lower end of the widely discussed $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion range, then trimmed his estimate to $1.45 trillion after folding the just-leaked third-quarter numbers into his trailing 12-month revenue and operating income. Some of the pushback to his first estimate, he wrote, was purely emotional, and some rested on cost-of-capital arguments he sees as at odds with market history and current pricing.

“The equity value that I obtain for Anthropic is close to the lower end of the offering price estimates,” Damodaran wrote, adding that it reflects not just his upbeat story about the company but also one about how the AI products and services market will evolve over time.