Anthropic IPO Terms Put FTX's Former Stake at Up to $35 Billion

By Tom Whitfield

Anthropic's proposed $70-to-$78 IPO price values the FTX estate's former stake at a theoretical $31.1 billion to $34.7 billion, according to its Tuesday, Nov. 10 amendment to the registration statement.

That theoretical value compares with the $1.34 billion the bankruptcy estate collected from selling the shares in March and June 2024. The proceeds equal 2.68 times Alameda Research's roughly $500 million investment. The estate no longer owns those shares, so the IPO figures are counterfactual rather than a claim on future proceeds.

What do the proposed IPO terms say?

Anthropic's amended registration statement proposes a price of "$70 to $78 a share". Applied to about 13.09 billion shares after the offering, the range implies an equity value of $917 billion to $1.02 trillion.

The company plans to list on Nasdaq under the ticker ANT, with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley as lead underwriters. The proposed offering includes about 825 million Class A shares: roughly 801.35 million newly issued shares and 23.65 million shares sold by existing shareholders.

Underwriters also have an option to buy an additional 123.75 million shares. Anthropic separately plans a private placement of about $26 billion in nonvoting Class N shares to strategic investors. The planned investors include Google, Nvidia, AMD, Broadcom, Micron, Microsoft and TSMC.

What happened to the FTX estate's Anthropic stake?

Alameda Research invested about $500 million in Anthropic in 2021 and 2022 for roughly 7.84% of the company. The position comprised about 44.54 million Series B shares, equivalent to roughly 445.4 million shares on a split-adjusted basis. Later fundraising diluted the stake to about 2.5%.

After FTX filed for bankruptcy in November 2022, its estate sold about 29.5 million shares in March 2024 for $884 million. It sold roughly 15 million additional shares in June for $452 million. Together, the two sales generated about $1.34 billion, or 2.68 times the original investment.

At $70 a share, the split-adjusted holding would be worth about $31.1 billion; at $78, about $34.7 billion. Anthropic's fully diluted high-end valuation, which includes options and restricted stock, is about $1.4 trillion. That basis would put the same stake at roughly $35 billion.

The two valuation measures are not interchangeable. The post-offering equity range uses about 13.09 billion shares, while the $1.4 trillion figure also includes options and restricted stock. That difference explains why the same former stake moves between $34.7 billion and roughly $35 billion.

Those are hypothetical values for shares the FTX estate no longer owns. They compare the stake's potential worth at the proposed IPO range with the cash proceeds the estate actually realized in 2024.

When could trading begin?

Pricing is expected around Wednesday, Nov. 18, with trading potentially beginning Nov. 19 on Nasdaq under ANT. If pricing proceeds around Nov. 18, the public price would provide a market reference for Anthropic and the sold stake's counterfactual value.