Anthropic Sent Bankers a $69.3 Billion IPO Plan, Then Told Them the Pricing Was Wrong

The biggest IPO of the AI boom got a messy start before it even launched. Late on Monday, an Anthropic representative sent banks a copy of a securities filing showing the company wanted to sell about 867 million shares at $70 to $80 each. A second email followed, saying the pricing details were inaccurate and that an updated filing would come later, according to emails seen by Reuters.

Anthropic declined to comment, and the follow-up email did not say what was wrong.

What the retracted filing showed

The original document laid out 866.7 million Class A shares. Anthropic would sell about 843.3 million of them and existing shareholders another 23.3 million. At the top of the range, that comes to $69.3 billion raised.

It also showed $26 billion lined up from the companies that sell Anthropic its chips and cloud capacity. Google, Nvidia, AMD, Broadcom, Micron, Microsoft and TSMC agreed to buy a separate class of stock (Class N) at the IPO price, in a private placement set to close right after the listing.

That list says a lot about how the AI money loop works. The same suppliers Anthropic pays for computing would become shareholders on day one, and Anthropic's earlier filing already showed it had committed to an $895 billion computing bill, close to seven times the cash it held.

A nervous market

The roadshow, where the company pitches the deal to investors, is still expected to start on Tuesday, with pricing the following week.

Timing is awkward. Other AI infrastructure and data center companies have delayed or pulled their listings as higher interest rates fed a selloff in shares and bonds of operators like CoreWeave. Investors once talked about a valuation as high as $2 trillion for Anthropic. Reuters reports $1.5 trillion is now seen as the top of the range.

Markets have so far taken the slip in stride. But a successful listing is seen as critical for an AI trade already rattled by the Democrats' midterm wins and the prospect of new rules on data centers, and a pricing error on the first document out the door is not the signal bankers wanted to send.

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