Australians can now buy into Anthropic’s US$1.4 trillion float, as a local share offer opens through CommSec and seven other brokers

Australian retail investors can now apply for shares in Anthropic’s float. The company’s Australian offer opened at 10am AEDT (7am AWST) on Wednesday, under a prospectus for Australian investors made available through Anthropic’s IPO website, and closes at 5pm AEDT on Tuesday 17 November, though individual brokers may stop taking applications earlier.

CommSec, the Commonwealth Bank’s broking arm, is the lead Australian broker, with Bell Potter, LGT Wealth, Macquarie, Morgans, Morgan Stanley Wealth Management, Sharesies and Stake also taking applications. The shares on offer are new Class A shares, the same class being sold in the US, and the final price will be set in US dollars.

There is no fixed number of shares set aside for Australians, and no minimum amount Anthropic must raise here. Anthropic does not plan to list on the ASX: successful applicants will hold shares that trade on the Nasdaq under the ticker “ANT”.

What should Australian applicants know?

Three practical points. The price is in US dollars, so the Australian dollar cost will move with the exchange rate between applying and settlement. Allocations are not guaranteed, and in a heavily demanded float, retail applications are often scaled back. And once trading starts, the shares will trade during US market hours, which is overnight in Australia.

The offer also opens while Australia moves to tighten rules on AI. The federal government has said it will introduce mandatory reporting of certain AI-related incidents and a regulator with penalty powers, after an AI agent from rival OpenAI accessed a Medicare statistics website without authorisation. Anthropic and OpenAI told federal parliament last month they would support mandatory reporting.

Australia is one of a handful of markets outside the US where retail investors can buy into the float directly, along with Japan, Canada and parts of Europe.

How the float is priced

Anthropic set the price range for its sharemarket debut on Tuesday, US time, in an updated filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. It plans to sell 825 million shares at US$70 to US$78 each on the Nasdaq, which would raise between US$57.75 billion and US$64.35 billion before any extra shares are sold.

At the top of the range, Anthropic would be valued at about US$1.4 trillion on a fully diluted basis, about A$2 trillion at current exchange rates. The pricing is expected on 18 November and trading on 19 November, according to people familiar with the deal, and the order book is reported to be already covered at the proposed range.

Who is buying?

Alongside the public offer, seven strategic partners have agreed to buy US$26 billion of stock at the IPO price: AMD, Broadcom, Google, Micron, Microsoft, Nvidia and TSMC. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are leading the sale.

The partner list reads like Anthropic’s supply chain. These are the companies that design, make and host the chips its models run on, and their money returns to them as spending on computing power.

How big is the business?

The prospectus shows revenue of about US$33.2 billion in the nine months to September, up about 1,200% on the same period last year. Anthropic’s annualised revenue run rate reached about US$81 billion at the end of October, up from about US$71 billion in late September.

The cost of getting there is just as large. The company recorded a net loss of about US$104 billion over the nine months, and it has committed to close to US$900 billion of future spending on computing capacity. Put simply, Anthropic is losing more than three dollars for every dollar it brings in, on a bet that demand keeps compounding.

Why does the timing matter?

The range arrives as investors grow less sure about AI valuations. The Nasdaq fell 5.5% last week, and Nvidia, the AI boom’s flagship stock, has fallen sharply this week while its board investigates chief executive Jensen Huang. One investor told US media that a US$1.5 trillion valuation would have been a “stretch”.

Even at the top of the range, the sale would rank behind SpaceX’s listing about five months ago, which raised about US$85.7 billion.

What does it mean for Australian investors?

Once listed, a company of this size would quickly become one of the biggest holdings in the US technology indices many Australian super funds and exchange-traded funds track, so its debut matters to retirement savings here even for people who never buy a share directly. Australians can apply in the float itself through the eight local brokers until 17 November, or buy on the Nasdaq once trading starts; there is no ASX listing.

The listing is also a test for the rest of the AI trade. A weak debut would raise questions about how much investors will pay for growth that is still far from profit; a strong one would be read as a green light for the next wave of AI listings.