On November 10 Beijing time, Anthropic refiled with the SEC after withdrawing its earlier IPO filing, and the updated document has now been published. It mainly contains Q3 financial information and annualized revenue as of October 31, but the most important part is the target IPO valuation.

Anthropic said it plans to list on Nasdaq under the ticker ANT, with a target market cap of about $1 trillion. The offering price is expected to be set next Wednesday (the 18th), with trading slated to begin the following Thursday (the 19th).

Even at a reduced $1 trillion target valuation, Anthropic still falls short of the highest IPO valuation on record — Musk's SpaceX at $1.77 trillion.

But Anthropic's target fundraising amount is $93.7 billion, still higher than SpaceX's final total of $85.7 billion, which would make it the largest single IPO in human history. The company expected to break that record is OpenAI.

When news of the IPO first emerged, market chatter put Anthropic's target market cap at $2 trillion. But then U.S. AI-related hardware stocks suffered a sharp selloff last week, losing $3 trillion in a single day. The crash appears to have weighed on Anthropic's valuation as well. Reports had already suggested it would be cut to $1.5 trillion, or even $1.2 trillion — but unexpectedly, Anthropic took a page from China's Double Eleven playbook and went straight to a 50%-off IPO. The company, however, seems less concerned about valuation than about whether it can list at all.

Anthropic founder Dario Amodei, who once worked at Baidu, has clearly learned a thing or two.

Coincidentally, reports over the past two days said OpenAI also scaled back its original target of raising at least $30 billion at a $1.4 trillion valuation to raising up to $20 billion at a $1.25 trillion valuation, of which $11 billion had already been received in November.

Clearly, OpenAI's latest fundraising round was aimed at undercutting Anthropic's IPO momentum — but unexpectedly, Anthropic was even more aggressive, directly slashing its IPO valuation to $1 trillion. That means if OpenAI cannot produce better numbers than Anthropic, its IPO valuation is very likely to invert relative to the primary market.

Back to Anthropic's IPO plan.

Under the plan, Anthropic intends to publicly offer 825 million shares of Class A common stock at a price range of $70 to $78 per share. Of these 825 million shares, 801.35 million are newly issued by the company and 23.65 million are being sold by existing shareholders.

At the same time, SEC filings show that seven partner companies — Google, Nvidia, AMD, Broadcom, Micron, Microsoft and TSMC — have agreed to subscribe through synchronized private placements for a total of $26 billion of Anthropic's non-voting common stock, at the same subscription price as the IPO offering price. Reports indicate that TSMC has been approved to invest in Anthropic with a maximum amount of $500 million — the same amount as OpenAI — showing that TSMC is treating both equally.

Regarding the offering price, Anthropic expects the midpoint IPO price to be $74 per share. After including the over-allotment option and private placements, the net fundraising amount would reach $93.7 billion. At the same time, Anthropic said it could issue up to $42 billion in notes to Broadcom — it is truly going to any lengths to stockpile ammunition.

On the revenue side, Anthropic's annualized revenue as of October 31 was about $81 billion, an increase of $10 billion compared with September 30, while the number of customers paying more than $100,000 annually grew to 11,900.

On the spending side, Anthropic's compute and infrastructure spending in Q3 was $9.9 billion, accounting for 58% of revenue, higher than 48% in Q2.

In terms of customer composition, Anthropic said no single customer contributed more than 10% of revenue in the first three quarters. Even more surprising, in the third quarter, revenue from outside the top five customers accounted for about 79%, higher than 64% in Q1, meaning the company's revenue sources are more diversified.