Anthropic PBC will sell shares directly to Australian investors in its highly anticipated initial public offering.
According to a filing submitted to the US Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday, retail investors in Australia will be able to take part in the offering once a prospectus is lodged with the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, with the exact number of shares to be disclosed in later documents.
People familiar with the matter said investors see a reasonable valuation range of US$1.4 trillion to US$1.75 trillion.
This is a deal destined for the history books — based on aggregation by several media outlets, Anthropic aims to raise as much as about US$100 billion, which would surpass SpaceX's US$86 billion raise in June this year and make it the largest IPO ever.
The company will list on the Nasdaq under the ticker ANT, and the market widely expects trading to begin in mid-November.
For Australia, the significance goes beyond simply getting a piece of the action.
Why Australia? A market short of AI assets
Australia's direct access this time comes against the backdrop of a local capital market that has long lacked core AI assets.
Compared with technology hubs in North America and Northeast Asia, Australia has none of the semiconductor companies or hyperscale cloud providers that have dominated global stock markets this year, leaving local investors without direct exposure — a gap that explains the enthusiastic reception for SpaceX's Australian offering this year.
SpaceX's precedent offers a quantitative reference: CommSec, the broker responsible for its Australian retail marketing, received more than 28,000 applications at the time, a record for the platform, though the broker did not disclose the final number of shares allocated to clients.
Australia's pension industry, worth about A$4.8 trillion (US$3.4 trillion), is the main institutional-side target of this offering.
Josh Gilbert, chief analyst for Asia-Pacific at eToro, judges that after "the loudest names in AI developed behind closed doors for years," this offering "should attract strong local interest"; compared with a heavily debt-dependent expansion story like Firmus, Anthropic's numbers put it on firmer footing and offer something public markets have almost never provided — direct exposure to a frontier model developer.
The shadow of Firmus: the deal that collapsed just half a month ago
This offering comes as "the Australian market is still reeling from the collapse of a data centre deal" — Firmus Grid.
The Nvidia-backed AI data centre company had planned to become Australia's largest IPO in nearly three decades: priced at A$11 per share, raising up to US$5.5 billion, implying a valuation of about A$43.7 billion (about US$30.4 billion), with listing originally set for 23 October.
But demand weakened markedly during bookbuilding — some potential investors worried about supply pressure from existing shareholders selling quickly after listing, and also questioned a price nearly three times higher than its August private funding round valuation of US$10.5 billion.
According to reports, underwriters at one point considered cutting the price to around A$8 per share.
In the end, Firmus announced on 9 October that it was withdrawing its ASX listing application, citing "recent market volatility and current market conditions," and turned to private market fundraising.
The company started in 2019 with Bitcoin mining, and of its roughly 1 gigawatt pipeline, only about 42 megawatts has actually been built; local institutions responded coolly, with a Morningstar analyst calling it a "boom-time" characteristic, while another fund said plainly that "we have difficulty with the fundamental arithmetic."
Its shareholder Maas Group plunged as much as 30% intraday that day.
It is precisely this contrast that forms the core argument of Cameron Gleeson, head of investment strategy at BetaShares: "Many Australian investors will be keen to participate in Anthropic's IPO. Anthropic is a completely different proposition from Firmus — Anthropic is selling a product for which customers are already paying, and paying more and more."
Anthropic's books: "paying customers" hold up
The prospectus disclosed for the first time the full financial picture of the Claude developer.
Revenue in the first half of 2026 was US$16.286 billion, compared with US$1.16 billion in the same period a year earlier; revenue had previously grown from US$41 million in 2023 to US$386 million in 2024 and US$4.59 billion in 2025.
Second-quarter revenue alone reached US$11.56 billion, and the company posted its first quarterly operating profit of US$974 million.
Although overall losses are huge, they stem mainly from accounting rather than cash spending: the net loss in the first half was US$80.748 billion, of which about US$72.388 billion came from changes in the fair value of financial instruments such as convertible notes as the company's valuation rose; operating loss for the same period was only US$693 million, adjusted operating profit was US$1.62 billion, operating cash flow turned positive at US$3.93 billion, and cash and short-term investments totalled US$131.65 billion as of 30 June.
This is indeed structurally different from a build-out story like Firmus that depends on external financing.
The customer side is equally solid: as of 30 September, more than 1,900 customers had spent over US$1 million in the past 12 months and more than 11,900 had spent over US$100,000 (compared with 950 on the same basis a year earlier), net revenue retention reached 900%, and more than half of Fortune 500 companies are customers.
The price is a very heavy computing bill: computing and infrastructure spending in the first half was about US$8.9 billion, and future computing commitments range from US$518 billion to more than US$600 billion depending on the measure.
Macquarie leads, CommSec plays the retail card again
The underwriting syndicate is large, and according to Australian media citing people familiar with the matter, the capital raising division of Macquarie Group is expected to lead the Australian portion of the offering, while CommSec, the brokerage arm of Commonwealth Bank, will lead retail marketing — the same party that ran retail marketing for SpaceX in Australia.
Note the division of roles: Macquarie handles lead underwriting, while CommSec handles marketing and distribution to retail investors; they are not the same role.
In addition, because the S-1 has yet to give a price range, the Australian prospectus has still not been lodged with ASIC; based on SpaceX's experience, it takes about a week from setting the price range to finalising the Australian documents, and local pricing, allocations and distribution arrangements all remain unknown.
The regulatory tone, however, has been set.
ASIC said it is taking a "pragmatic and constructive" approach to the offering, consistent with how it handled SpaceX's June IPO, but requires substantive disclosure on local risks, governance differences and investor rights.
The disclosure documents Australian investors receive will consist of the US registration documents plus an Australia-specific supplement.
This is not formalism: Anthropic's governance structure is unusual — a single Class F share held collectively by seven founders controls 50.1% of shareholder voting power, a majority of board seats are elected by a trust, and a public-interest fund holds 5% of non-voting shares, with the founders pledging to donate 80% of their personal holdings.
What retail investors get is economic benefit, not control.
The offering also covers Japan, Canada, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and parts of Europe; Australia is one of the few markets among them that allows direct retail participation.
Professional investors need not wait: two paths in
Under the prospectus arrangements, professional and sophisticated investors can participate directly in Anthropic's US offering without waiting for Australian regulatory documents.
Large institutional investors such as pension funds fall into the professional investor category; the legal threshold for sophisticated investors is net assets of at least A$2.5 million, or annual income of at least A$250,000.
Local broker IG Australia has already launched a channel allowing traders to subscribe for single shares, and its managing director Michael Jones said Australian retail investors have found it hard in the past to obtain allocations in large US IPOs; Anthropic volume on its CFD market has expanded more than 27-fold since launch, with early indicative demand even stronger than that for SpaceX at the time.
Morningstar, meanwhile, points to timing: the offering falls after the US midterm elections, when policy direction and the earnings picture for the AI sector are clearer, which may in fact be a favourable factor.
In other words, Australian institutional money has long been getting in through the back door — this time what is opening is the channel for "ordinary people," and that is precisely where market sentiment is most delicate: it inherits the record retail demand set by SpaceX while also carrying the psychological scars left by Firmus's failure.
The risks are there too.
The prospectus itself warns that rapid revenue growth "cannot be guaranteed to continue to any degree"; customer concentration is high, with two unnamed customers accounting for about 23% of first-half revenue on one reported basis, or the top five customers accounting for about 25% with no single customer exceeding 10%.
Nigel Green, chief executive of deVere Group, described it as "a referendum on the entire AI trade": if the listing surges, more AI companies will queue up to go public; if it stumbles, tech valuations could be repriced quickly.
Lightshed put it more bluntly — Anthropic "could become the most valuable company in the world, or it could end up bankrupt."
For Australia, there is also a dimension beyond finance: Anthropic has already named Australia in its prospectus as the only location outside North America with explicitly identified contracted data centre capacity, and has publicly lobbied for changes to local copyright rules, saying this is a precondition for advancing multibillion-dollar data centre investment.
Commonwealth Bank of Australia became a strategic investor in Anthropic as early as 2025, and its annual report disclosed that the stake was valued at US$1.5 billion at the end of June.
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