FTX bankruptcy liquidation leads to 'the worst sell-off in history': missing out on Anthropic's $100 billion IPO feast.

November 11 — Anthropic has publicly filed and updated its prospectus (S-1/A) with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, planning to list on Nasdaq under the ticker symbol "ANT," with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley serving as lead underwriters.

The latest amended prospectus filed on November 10 discloses that ANT's offering price range is $70–$78 per share, with approximately 825 million Class A ordinary shares offered to the public (approximately 801.35 million shares issued by the company itself and approximately 23.65 million shares sold by existing shareholders), and the underwriters have an over-allotment option for approximately 123.75 million additional shares. At the same time, the company will conduct a private placement of approximately $26 billion in non-voting Class N shares to strategic investors including Google, Nvidia, AMD, Broadcom, Micron, Microsoft, and TSMC, at a price consistent with the IPO price.

The market expects pricing around November 18, with trading potentially commencing on November 19. Based on approximately 13.09 billion shares post-offering, this corresponds to a valuation of approximately $917 billion–$1.02 trillion; if fully diluted factors such as options and restricted stock are included, the high end could reach approximately $1.4 trillion. The market had previously expected the fundraising size to reach approximately $100 billion and the valuation to touch as high as $2 trillion; the latest terms have moderated somewhat but are still expected to make this one of the largest listing cases in the AI industry.

It is worth noting that FTX was once a major early shareholder of Anthropic. Between 2021 and 2022, Alameda Research, an FTX-affiliated trading company, participated in Anthropic's financing, acquiring approximately 7.84% of the company (corresponding to approximately 44.54 million Series B shares) for approximately $500 million. At the time, generative AI had not yet experienced the explosive growth that followed, and this investment became one of the most valuable non-crypto assets on FTX's balance sheet.

However, after FTX filed for bankruptcy protection in November 2022, the bankruptcy estate needed to recover liquidity as quickly as possible to address the customer asset shortfall and creditor payouts. In March 2024, after court approval, the FTX bankruptcy estate first sold approximately 29.5 million shares for total proceeds of approximately $884 million; it then sold the remaining approximately 15 million shares in June 2024, recovering approximately $452 million more. The two transactions recovered approximately $1.34 billion in total, approximately 2.68 times the original $500 million investment. Anthropic's valuation has continued to rise since then, and the future IPO upside no longer belongs to FTX creditors.

If FTX had not sold its shares back then, and assuming its approximately 7.84% stake was not diluted in subsequent financing rounds, then at an Anthropic valuation of $1.4 trillion, the theoretical value of this stake would reach approximately $109.8 billion, a 219x increase, representing a return of 21,852%.

Based on the most commonly cited customer fund shortfall of approximately $8 billion at the time of FTX's bankruptcy, $109.8 billion would be roughly equivalent to filling 13.7 such shortfalls. Even after deducting the initial $500 million principal, the theoretical profit of $109.3 billion would still be sufficient to cover approximately 13.6 times.

It should be noted that this is a static calculation. Anthropic subsequently underwent multiple financing rounds, and the original shareholding ratio has been substantially diluted. According to the fully diluted share count disclosed in the latest prospectus, the original approximately 445.4 million shares (post-split) now correspond to a shareholding ratio that has dropped to approximately 2.5%. Based on the IPO price range of $70–78, the theoretical value of this stake is approximately $31.1 billion–$34.7 billion; even at the high end of the fully diluted valuation of approximately $1.4 trillion, it would be approximately $35 billion. Compared with the theoretical upper limit of nearly $110 billion under the "maintaining 7.84% unchanged" scenario, the actual value after dilution has fallen substantially.