TL;DR

Details of Anthropic’s planned share sale were emailed to banks late on Monday 9 November and then withdrawn, Reuters reported in an exclusive based on emails it has seen. The original securities filing priced shares between $70 and $80, which at the upper end would bring in $69.3bn. A follow-up email from Anthropic said the pricing details were inaccurate and that the filing would be updated.

What the retracted filing showed

According to Reuters, the filing covered just under 867 million Class A shares. Roughly 843.3 million would come from Anthropic itself, with 23.3 million sold by existing shareholders. The email did not say which details were wrong, Reuters could not establish it, and Anthropic would not comment.

The same filing described a $26bn private placement alongside the listing. Seven tech groups, among them Google, Nvidia, Microsoft and TSMC, as well as AMD, Broadcom and Micron, signed up to take Class N shares at whatever price the IPO sets, closing immediately afterwards.

Anthropic was expected to launch its investor roadshow formally on 10 November, with pricing the following week.

The backdrop

The listing comes as other AI infrastructure and data centre companies have delayed or pulled their own flotations, Reuters notes, as higher interest rates fed a sell-off hitting the equity and debt of operators such as CoreWeave. Investors once talked of a valuation as high as $2tn; $1.5tn is now viewed as the ceiling.

Reuters also points to the scale of Anthropic’s commitments: almost $900bn in computing deals, with Google and Amazon among the partners. In a revised filing this month, Anthropic reported revenue of almost $17bn for the quarter to 30 September, while its quarterly growth rate has fallen sharply.

What it means

For UK investors, the retraction matters because Anthropic has named UK brokers for a retail share offer. Until the updated filing appears, the circulated range is not a reliable guide. We covered investor doubts over the IPO’s timing last week.

In our view, the $26bn placement is the more lasting detail. Google, one of the placement buyers, is already an investor, a supplier of Anthropic’s computing power and a distribution partner, Reuters notes. That kind of circular tie, where a supplier also funds its customer, deserves scrutiny as Reuters reports wider questions about whether AI spending can be sustained.