The report
Anthropic has selected Nasdaq for its initial public offering, Business Insider’s Katie Roof reported on 13 September, citing a person familiar with the plans. The company still hopes to complete the listing in October, according to The Next Web, which followed up the report. Anthropic has not publicly commented on the choice of exchange.
The decision is one of the last structural choices before a public filing. It settles where the stock will trade and which indexes it can join, and it comes as the company’s valuation, the size of the raise and its anchor investors are still being negotiated.
Why Nasdaq
The New York Stock Exchange has historically collected the biggest debuts, but index eligibility weighs on the other side. Only Nasdaq-listed companies can enter the Nasdaq 100, TNW noted, and inclusion brings the demand of the funds that track it.
Nasdaq also took SpaceX earlier this year at a $1.75tn valuation. If Anthropic lists there as planned, the exchange will hold both of the largest listings in a year that has otherwise been thin for technology flotations.
The numbers so far are unofficial
No prospectus is public. Anthropic filed confidentially, and appointed Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs to lead the offering, TNW reported, putting the valuation at the time of that filing at $965bn. Estimates circulating around the deal now put it near $2tn.
Reuters reported on 11 September that Anthropic is working towards raising about $100bn at a valuation of roughly $2tn, and that Nvidia is in talks to invest as much as $10bn as an anchor investor. A raise of that size would be the largest flotation ever attempted.
Every one of those figures comes from people briefing reporters rather than from a filing, and any of them can change once the offering is marketed.
Two labs, opposite decisions in one week
The report comes days after OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman told Fortune that OpenAI would not go public in 2026. “Given everything happening with safety, right now would be an ill-advised moment to go public,” he said.
Anthropic is moving ahead in the same week that its chief executive, Dario Amodei, called on the industry to pace the development of frontier AI. The two positions are not contradictory on their face: a listing raises capital, and slowing the frontier is a question of what that capital is spent on. But a public company answers to shareholders every quarter, and a prospectus will have to explain how a commitment to slower development fits alongside a raise of this size.
What to watch
The public filing. When Anthropic makes its registration statement public, the valuation, the size of the raise, the underwriting syndicate and any Nvidia anchor commitment will be on the record for the first time. For a listing completed in October, that document would have to appear within weeks.
The other thing to watch is the timetable itself. Earlier reporting put completion before the US midterm elections in November, and an offering this large has little room to slip.
