The Anthropic IPO won praise from Bill Ackman on Friday, but the billionaire investor said he will not buy shares when the artificial intelligence company goes public. Ackman called Anthropic “perhaps the most amazing business story of this century in terms of from zero to where it is today.” He was speaking at Yahoo Finance Invest.
Anthropic plans to list on the Nasdaq under the ticker ANT and is expected to begin trading on Thursday, November 19. The company has set a price range of $70 to $78 per share, targeting a fully diluted valuation of about $1.4 trillion.
Anthropic IPO terms and the $1.4 trillion target
The Anthropic IPO filing showed third-quarter revenue up 1,127 percent to $17 billion. The same filing showed a $23.29 billion loss for the quarter. The figures show a company growing fast while spending heavily to build its business.
Ackman said the revenue growth and the quality of Anthropic’s Claude AI assistant stand out. Pershing Square, the hedge fund he runs, uses Claude internally. “It is clearly an amazing company,” he said, adding that the story is “absolutely remarkable.” The Anthropic IPO prospectus gives public investors the same numbers he was reacting to.
Anthropic IPO valuation is too wide for Ackman
Ackman said the problem is the price. “I think it’s just a much more complicated question as to what that business is worth. It’s very hard to nail that with any degree of precision,” he said. “It could be worth a lot more, a lot less, depending upon a few variables that are difficult to predict. And that’s why it doesn’t fit into our portfolio.”
Pershing Square looks for businesses it can predict with a high degree of confidence over a long period, and the Anthropic IPO does not fit that test. Ackman named Microsoft, Visa and Mastercard as holdings that fit that approach. “We think of ourselves as very low-risk investors. We want to invest in businesses that we can predict with a very high degree of confidence,” he said.
He called the Anthropic IPO a more speculative bet than buying Visa, a company Pershing Square owns. The fund has also increased its bets on AI-related stocks in recent years, but Ackman said Anthropic’s range of possible outcomes is too broad for the portfolio.
Anthropic IPO tests a hot AI market
Ackman praised the company before the Anthropic IPO filing. In a Bloomberg Television interview on September 30, he called it “perhaps the greatest business story” he had ever seen and said Pershing Square was less likely to own it. At that point the company had not yet filed its IPO documents.
The market has been closely focused on a small number of large AI listings, including Anthropic and SpaceX, along with the suppliers that support them. Ackman said markets are too focused on big IPOs, and he told Bloomberg that government oversight is not needed for larger AI firms because the companies have strong reasons to be careful about what they release.
Anthropic’s 2025 revenue rose twelvefold to about $4.6 billion, according to a Reuters report on a confidential filing, while net losses for the year totaled $42 billion. The company was targeting a $2 trillion market value at that stage, before the price range in the amended filing set a lower figure.
Ackman also said he is less concerned about Anthropic or OpenAI as a source of harm from AI than about a bad actor using open-source models. He said a company with a product that can cause enormous harm will be very careful about releasing it.
The IPO comes after a year in which AI listings drew heavy attention from investors. The amended filing gives the market a detailed look at the company’s revenue and losses ahead of the November 19 debut.
The Anthropic IPO will give public investors the same valuation question Ackman described. The $70 to $78 price range puts a large price on the company before its first day of trading. Whether the market agrees with that price will become clear when trading opens on November 19.