At the end of 2025, Anthropic was bringing in revenue at an annualized pace of about $9 billion. By the end of July 2026, that figure had topped $65 billion, according to Bloomberg, putting the company behind Claude ahead of OpenAI on that measure. Now the Anthropic IPO is getting close. The company confidentially filed its IPO paperwork on June 1, and Bloomberg reported on September 13 that it has picked Nasdaq for the listing. What you still can't do is buy Anthropic stock on a public exchange.
Here's where the listing stands, what the numbers say, the few legitimate ways to get exposure before the first trade, and how to approach the stock once it's live. One thing has changed since spring: some of the pre-IPO routes that looked open earlier this year are ones Anthropic now says it won't recognize.
Where the Anthropic IPO Stands
The June filing was a confidential draft S-1, the registration statement a company files with the SEC before selling shares to the public. Filing confidentially lets regulators review it privately. In its announcement, Anthropic said the filing gives it the option to go public once the SEC finishes its review, and that the number of shares and the price hadn't been set.
The next milestone is the public S-1. That's the document that reveals Anthropic's audited financials, its risks, its share structure, the Anthropic stock ticker, and eventually the expected price range. It has to be released at least 15 days before the roadshow, when executives pitch the deal to big institutional investors. Reports point to an October listing, so if that holds, the public filing should land within weeks. Until it does, there's no official Anthropic IPO date.
On size, earlier reports had Anthropic raising $60 billion or more, and reports in August said it's seeking a public valuation of $2 trillion or higher, though that number isn't final. That would be roughly double the $965 billion valuation from its private funding round in May.
Anthropic hasn't said whether it will reserve IPO shares for individual investors. SpaceX set aside about 30% of its June offering for retail buyers, and OpenAI's CFO has said OpenAI will hold back shares for individuals too, though its listing now looks like a 2027 event. We cover that timeline in our guide to buying OpenAI stock.
What Anthropic Is Worth and What Could Go Wrong
Anthropic's last private price was set on May 28, when it raised $65 billion at a $965 billion valuation. Altimeter, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, and Sequoia led the round, with Fidelity, T. Rowe Price, Blackstone, and Jane Street among the other buyers. Amazon added $5 billion, and Google and Broadcom committed five gigawatts of computing capacity built on Google's custom AI chips.
The growth is the bull case. Anthropic's revenue run rate, meaning its current monthly revenue multiplied by 12, went from $9 billion at the end of 2025 to $47 billion in May and more than $65 billion by the end of July. The Financial Times reported that investors expect it to finish 2026 somewhere between $100 billion and $120 billion. Most of that money comes from businesses paying to use Claude, especially for coding, rather than from consumer subscriptions.
Growth like that is what holds up the price. At $965 billion, private investors paid about 15 times Anthropic's current run rate. At $2 trillion, public buyers would pay about 31 times, betting that growth keeps going at something close to this pace. Earlier projections reported by The Wall Street Journal and The Information had Anthropic breaking even around 2028, two years before OpenAI expects to, but those forecasts were built when Anthropic expected a fraction of the revenue it now brings in. The public S-1 will be the first real look at its costs.
The risks are real, and one already showed up. On June 12, the Commerce Department ordered Anthropic to cut off foreign nationals' access to its two newest models, Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5, citing national security. Because it couldn't verify every user's nationality, Anthropic shut the models off for everyone, and full access didn't return until Commerce lifted the restrictions at the end of June. That's a kind of risk most software companies never face.
Competition is the more familiar one. OpenAI, Google, Meta, and xAI all sell AI models to the same businesses, and the lead in this industry has changed hands quickly. Governance matters too. Anthropic is a public benefit corporation, a company legally required to weigh a stated mission alongside profits, and an independent Long-Term Benefit Trust has the right to elect a growing share of its board, eventually a majority. The S-1 will spell out how much say public shareholders actually get.
How to Invest in Anthropic Before It Goes Public
No public exchange lists Anthropic shares today, so every route before the IPO is indirect.
Amazon (AMZN) and Alphabet (GOOGL) are the biggest outside backers. Fortune reported in June that Amazon has invested about $13 billion and likely owns a stake in the mid-to-high teens, worth roughly $135 billion to $160 billion at the May valuation. Google owns about 14%, contractually capped at 15%, worth around $135 billion. Those are huge sums, but Amazon is worth about $2.7 trillion and Alphabet about $4.1 trillion, so Anthropic works out to roughly 5% to 6% of Amazon's value and a little over 3% of Alphabet's. Owning either stock is mostly a bet on their core businesses.
A few funds that everyday investors can buy report Anthropic among their holdings:
- Fundrise Innovation Fund (VCX) began trading on the NYSE in March, and Anthropic is its largest position at about 22% of the portfolio.
- ARK Venture Fund (ARKVX) is an interval fund, meaning you can buy in on any business day but can only sell during periodic buyback windows. SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic together made up more than 26% of its value in late May.
- Destiny Tech100 (DXYZ) holds about three dozen private tech companies, Anthropic among them.
Check the price before you buy. VCX and DXYZ trade on exchanges like stocks, so their share prices float with demand rather than tracking net asset value, or NAV, the per-share worth of what they actually hold. VCX listed with a NAV of $18.97 and within days traded at more than 20 times that. In late August it closed at $39.84 against a June 30 NAV of $21.70, an 84% premium. If a premium like that shrinks, you can lose money even while Anthropic's value climbs.
Be even more careful with anyone offering Anthropic shares directly. In May, Anthropic warned that any sale or transfer of its stock not approved by its board is void and won't be recognized on its books. It said it doesn't allow special purpose vehicles, the pooled entities often used to resell private shares, to acquire its stock. It also said anyone selling Anthropic shares to the general public through forward contracts, tokenized securities, or similar setups is likely committing fraud or selling something that may have no value. The company even named eight platforms it says operate without its authorization, including Hiive and Forge Global, though Forge disputed that. Accredited investor or not, that leaves very few legitimate ways to own Anthropic before the IPO.
How to Buy Anthropic Stock on IPO Day
Once the public S-1 is out, the process looks like any other IPO:
- Fund a brokerage account now. Retail IPO orders usually run through brokers like Robinhood, Fidelity, Charles Schwab, and SoFi, and request windows can close the day before trading begins.
- Request IPO shares if your broker offers them. You typically submit a conditional order for a number of shares up to a maximum price. For a deal this popular, expect a partial fill or nothing.
- Read the S-1 for the ticker, the price range, Anthropic's actual profits or losses, and the share structure.
- Use limit orders if you buy after trading starts. A limit order only executes at your price or better. A market order takes whatever price the market offers in the first chaotic minutes.
The price range in the S-1 is set by Anthropic and its underwriters, the banks running the deal. The Anthropic stock price you see on day one is set by demand, and the gap can be large. SpaceX sold shares at $135 in June, closed its first day at $160.95, hit $225.64 the following week, and was trading around $151 by mid-September. Anyone who bought at the peak is still down about a third.
If you want in, a steadier plan is to set your total budget before the IPO and buy in pieces over a few months. If the share price looks steep, fractional shares let you put in $50 or $100 instead of buying a whole share once your broker supports them for the new stock, and our guide to investing with little money explains how they work. Keep the position small enough that a 50% drop wouldn't force your hand, because a newly public company worth a trillion dollars or more can move that much in weeks, as SpaceX showed. Anthropic may be one of the defining companies of the decade. Whether its stock is a good buy at its first price is a separate question.
Figures from Anthropic's announcements and reporting by Bloomberg, Fortune, TechCrunch, and CNBC, as of mid-September 2026. IPO details can change quickly, so check the public S-1 before acting on anything here.