Anthropic may offer up to 20% of its IPO to retail, Bloomberg says

Dario Amodei at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos, January 2025

Anthropic is weighing setting aside 15% to 20% of the shares in its IPO for retail investors, people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg on Wednesday, 28 October. JPMorgan will lead the US retail offering, they said. TNW has not independently verified the report.

The S-1 prospectus only says the banks may set aside shares for their online brokerage customers. SpaceX set aside about 20% for retail investors at its June listing, after first planning 30%, as Samuel O’Brient reported for Business Insider.

“Individual money is less sensitive to price, and a book that leans on it lets the banks price the deal higher than institutions alone would support,” Harrison Rolfes, a senior research analyst at PitchBook, told Business Insider.

Senator Elizabeth Warren has told Anthropic to answer four pages of questions about its IPO filing by 3 November. Corrie Driebusch reported the letter for The Wall Street Journal, which saw a copy. The Massachusetts Democrat sent it to chief executive Dario Amodei on Tuesday.

She asked how Anthropic can ensure its technology will not become an existential threat to humanity. She also asked about its ties to Amazon and Broadcom, and how it will justify a valuation that could approach $2tn. Anthropic did not immediately respond to the Journal.

The risks “demand greater scrutiny before they become intertwined with the public capital markets,” Warren wrote, according to the Journal.

The filing notes concerns, inside Anthropic and outside it, about where advanced AI could lead. It sits alongside the warning that Anthropic could become a political target.

Sufficiently advanced AI systems “could, if not developed, deployed, and operated with appropriate safeguards, oversight, and security measures, pose catastrophic or existential risks to humanity,” the filing says.

It notes that proposed US laws contemplate the nationalisation or mandatory shutdown of frontier AI systems. The rules Anthropic itself argues for could slow its growth, it adds. Government contracts make up about 1% of its revenue.

The same document sizes the prize. Anthropic says knowledge work was worth more than $40tn globally in 2025, which tops SpaceX’s $28.5tn market estimate, as the Journal noted.

TNW has reported the Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Broadcom deals. Anthropic also agreed to spend up to $120.5bn with SpaceXAI, the SpaceX unit formerly known as xAI. That reaches about $3.1bn a month from December. After early 2027, either side can cancel on 90 days’ notice.

It also agreed to spend up to $44.6bn with Nscale and about $41.3bn with Lambda. It expects to pay $125bn to $150bn for more TPU chip capacity from 2028 to 2031, outside its commitments table. Since 30 June, it has signed deals with about $245bn in minimum payments. The total is still blank. The Journal had reported that Anthropic could spend $750bn on compute.

Cost of revenue, mostly compute that serves customers, was $2.38bn in the first half, against $16.3bn of revenue. That is a gross margin of about 85%, the figure Semafor called Anthropic’s key number, citing The Information. It leaves out training. Total compute spending was $8.95bn.

“We do not expect our revenue will continue to grow at comparable rates, and we cannot assure you that it will continue to grow at all,” the filing says.

Margins may also shrink as new compute arrives before the revenue it supports. Models released in the six months to 30 September made up over 80% of third-quarter revenue.

Sales through Amazon, Google and Microsoft’s cloud marketplaces were 48% of first-half revenue, up from 11% in 2023. Google has an option to buy up to $10bn of stock at the IPO price. Anthropic values the convertible notes Amazon holds at $108.6bn; Amazon puts them at $97.9bn, Equibles Research found.

Some shares can be sold from the first trading day. Co-founders and holders of more than 0.5% must wait until after third-quarter 2027 results, or 365 days. Most others are free after first-quarter 2027 results, or 180 days.

In his newsletter, critic Ed Zitron wrote that the company the S-1 describes “no longer exists”. He pointed to the blank third-quarter figures. MBI Deep Dives called Anthropic “a much, much better business” than it had expected, but said it would not yet buy.

Cristian Dina is the CRO at The Next Web. He has interviewed 300+ industry leaders and authored the book King of Networking, establishing hi (show all) Cristian Dina is the CRO at The Next Web. He has interviewed 300+ industry leaders and authored the book King of Networking, establishing himself as one of the most connected and respected voices in the ecosystem. At just 23 years old, Cristian was included in the Forbes 30 Under 30 2025 list, representing a new generation of tech builders, bold thinkers who move fast, build with purpose, and create real impact.

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