Anthropic hasn't priced a single share yet, and its IPO is already oversubscribed. Two days into the roadshow, the Claude maker has drawn orders for several times the 825 million shares on offer, Bloomberg reported Wednesday, driven by large anchor-size bids. CNBC reported the book was fully covered on day one, with demand topping SpaceX's at the same stage.

That is the kind of problem every banker wants. Anthropic filed at $70–$78 a share, valuing it at roughly $1.4 trillion fully diluted. Now, according to the Financial Times, bankers are preparing to lift the valuation to $1.5 trillion — and the order book suggests they may not need to ask twice. Morningstar already puts a $92 fair value on the stock, about 24% above the $74 midpoint.

The numbers behind the demand are doing a lot of the selling. Anthropic's run-rate revenue hit $81 billion as of October 31, Reuters reported, and Claude just had its biggest traffic month ever: roughly 1.3 billion web visits in October, up 24% from September and 536% year over year, per Similarweb data shared with Forbes. Claude is now the 25th most-visited site on the web, still third behind ChatGPT and Gemini.

Some perspective: $1.4 trillion is already a climb-down. Investors were discussing close to $2 trillion six weeks ago, before an AI stock selloff pushed large backers to press for less. Even so, the filed range is about a 45% premium to Anthropic's $965 billion Series H valuation in May. The market is being asked to pay up — and so far it is saying yes.

The deal's structure helps explain why. Anthropic lined up a $26 billion private placement from the companies that supply its chips and cloud — Google and Nvidia at $10 billion each, plus AMD, Broadcom, Micron, Microsoft and TSMC. With up to $64.35 billion from the public float, the total raise could reach $90.4 billion, topping SpaceX's record debut earlier this year. The suppliers are buying their biggest customer.

The clock is tight from here. Anthropic streams a live investor event Friday with Amodei and JPMorgan's Jamie Dimon; pricing is expected November 18, with Nasdaq trading under ANT starting November 19. OpenAI has said it won't list in 2026, leaving Anthropic as the first frontier AI lab to face public-market judgment — and the oversubscribed book says investors are eager. The $1.5 trillion question is whether the first day of trading agrees.

— via OpenTools