Should I buy the Anthropic IPO?

On Thursday 19 November, Anthropic starts trading on the Nasdaq stock exchange in New York, under the ticker ANT. It’s the company behind Claude, the AI assistant I use almost every day.

This is its IPO, or initial public offering: the moment a private company first sells its shares to the public. Anthropic is asking $70 to $78 a share. At the top of that range it raises about $64 billion, and the whole company is valued at up to $1.4 trillion.

UK investors can apply for shares at the offer price, before trading starts, through seven platforms including AJ Bell, Hargreaves Lansdown and interactive investor.

So should you?

My answer is no. Not at the IPO, and not on day one.

The business is the real thing. Anthropic took in $17 billion of revenue in the three months to September, twelve times the same period a year earlier. By the end of October it was selling at a rate of about $81 billion a year.

Morningstar reckons the company is worth $1.7 trillion, comfortably above the IPO price. Betting markets give 88% odds that the shares end their first day above the offer price.

I don’t doubt any of that. But a great company and a great investment are two different things, and the difference is the price you pay.

Over the past twelve months Anthropic’s sales came to about $35 billion. At $1.4 trillion, you’d be paying about $40 for every $1 of those sales. The banks running the deal reportedly expect to price it above the range, which would make it more.

That almost never happens. Jay Ritter, the University of Florida professor who has studied US IPOs for decades, looked at 4,110 of them between 1980 and 2024. Fourteen were priced at more than $40 per $1 of sales. On average, those 14 did 15.4% worse than the market over the following three years.

The bulls’ answer is that last year’s sales are the wrong yardstick for a company growing this fast. Fair enough. On October’s rate of sales, the price is about 17 times. That’s still a lot to pay for a company that doesn’t make a profit.

And it doesn’t. When I buy a share, I’m buying my slice of a company’s profits. Here there aren’t any yet. Goldman Sachs expects Anthropic’s losses from running the business to peak at about $40 billion in 2027, and doesn’t expect it to take in more cash than it spends until 2030. It has also committed to spending around $900 billion on computing power.

You’d be paying today for profits that may turn up in four years’ time.

An IPO is where the people who got in early get their chance to cash out. That’s not a scandal. It’s what IPOs are for. But you should know who’s on the other side of your trade.

Anthropic’s founders are each selling about $250 million of shares in the deal. Some directors and officers can sell from the first day. Around 3.6 billion more shares can be sold before six months are up, and each release puts more shares on the market.

The banks have about $3 billion of fees riding on this deal, according to Tom Hayes, the American hedge fund manager whose work I follow. Expect plenty of cheerleading between now and Thursday.

In June it was SpaceX. UK investors put in for nearly $1 billion of shares and got $364 million. Bigger applications got about 38p for every £1 they asked for.

That’s how hot deals work. When demand is high, small investors get scaled back. When the big money doesn’t want the shares, you get everything you asked for. So if you get every share you applied for, that should worry you.

SpaceX listed at $135, shot up to more than $225, then fell as low as $104.83 in August. On 6 November it closed at $134.27, a whisker below what IPO buyers paid five months earlier.

Hayes has a figure for this too: at some point in their first year, the 20 biggest listings since 2010 fell an average of 60% from their high.

Facebook is the classic. It listed in 2012 at $38. By September it was below $18, and it didn’t get back to $38 until August 2013. Today, as Meta, it’s one of the most valuable companies in the world. The business was fine. The price wasn’t.

If you own a global tracker fund, one that buys a little of every big company in the world, you’ll probably own a slice of Anthropic within weeks without lifting a finger. MSCI added SpaceX to its World index 17 days after it listed. It’ll be a sliver, which is about the right size for a company that doesn’t yet make a profit.

S&P 500 trackers, like the one at the core of my own investments, won’t hold it for at least a year. That index won’t admit a company until it makes a profit.

If you really want to own Anthropic directly, wait. Let its first set of results come out and the first batches of insider shares hit the market. Then buy an amount you could watch halve without losing sleep.

And don’t buy Amazon or Google to get Anthropic through the back door. Amazon owns somewhere between 11% and 19% of it. That stake is worth roughly 5% to 9% of Amazon itself, so $10,000 of Amazon shares gets you about $470 to $940 of Anthropic. Buy Amazon if you want Amazon.

I think Anthropic could be one of the defining companies of the next ten years. I also think you’ll get a better price for it than next Thursday’s.

Every week I show UK readers how to manage their own investments, without paying a financial adviser to do it for them. It’s free: timswealthletter.com

I’m not a financial adviser and this isn’t advice. It’s what I think, and why. Figures are from published analysis of Anthropic’s IPO filing and press reports as of 13 November 2026, before the final price is set.