Anthropic Picks Nasdaq for Its Record $2 Trillion IPO — the Same Exchange That Landed SpaceX

The last unanswered logistical question about Anthropic’s IPO just got its answer. On Sunday, September 13, Business Insider’s Katie Roof reported — and Bloomberg independently confirmed — that Anthropic has selected Nasdaq as the listing venue for its potential initial public offering, according to a person familiar with the company’s plans. The Claude maker has been targeting an October listing after confidentially filing a draft S-1 with the SEC on June 1, and some estimates now put its eventual valuation at as much as $2 trillion, though that figure has not been finalized.

It is, on its face, a piece of administrative housekeeping. In practice, it is the latest move in a high-stakes competition between exchanges to become the official home of the AI industry’s public markets era.

Nasdaq’s second trillion-dollar catch

The decision hands Nasdaq another mega-listing just months after it secured the coveted SpaceX debut earlier this year, which closed at a $1.75 trillion valuation — still the largest IPO on record. If Anthropic completes its offering near the figures being discussed, it would eclipse even that, instantly ranking the company among the most valuable corporations on Earth and giving Nasdaq the two largest technology listings in history back to back.

The prize is not just bragging rights. The record-setting size of these IPOs, combined with a years-long dearth of major tech listings, has made the exchange competition unusually valuable. Both Nasdaq and the New York Stock Exchange want to be seen as the destination for the wave of AI IPOs expected to follow — a pipeline that could include OpenAI itself once its leadership decides the moment is right.

Listing on Nasdaq also carries a mechanical benefit: exchange membership is a prerequisite for inclusion in the Nasdaq-100 Index, which would put Anthropic alongside the largest technology companies in the world and guarantee passive-index demand for its shares from day one.

A bet on public markets in a season of doubt

The timing is what makes the decision remarkable. Anthropic is preparing to go public at precisely the moment the industry’s safety discourse has reached a rolling boil.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told Fortune this week that OpenAI will not go public in 2026, saying that “given everything happening with safety, right now would be an ill-advised moment to go public.” The risk conversation gained mainstream attention last week after a former Anthropic researcher’s viral departure letter warned of a greater-than-10% chance of human extinction from advanced AI — followed by two more safety researchers leaving Anthropic and Google DeepMind for the nonprofit evaluator METR, and Anthropic’s own CEO Dario Amodei publishing an essay calling on frontier labs to deliberately “pace the frontier.”

Against that backdrop, Anthropic — the lab founded on a safety-first charter — is sprinting toward what could be the largest public offering ever attempted. The contrast is not lost on observers: one CEO delays an IPO citing existential risk, while his closest competitor finalizes its exchange paperwork weeks later.

What the venue choice actually means

For all the theater, veterans of the listing game caution against reading too much into it. There is no definitive evidence that companies perform better on one exchange versus another, and in terms of how Anthropic’s stock ultimately trades, the decision likely matters little.

One genuine difference is market-maker mechanics. The two exchanges use different processes for determining the opening price on the first day of trading, and high-volume IPOs can cause delays and confusion — Nasdaq’s technical issues during Facebook’s 2012 debut remain the cautionary tale every listing team studies. An offering of Anthropic’s scale would stress-test whichever system it plugs into.

Historically, the NYSE has won many of the largest listings overall, but Nasdaq has remained dominant in technology, with major listings including Cerebras — itself an AI infrastructure company — and Rivian.

The road ahead

Anthropic’s IPO filing has not yet been made public. Under standard SEC procedure, the company will need to release its financials at least 15 days before it begins its investor roadshow — a clock that makes a mid-October marketing start consistent with a public prospectus arriving in late September, matching the timeline Reuters reported earlier this month.

The known parameters of the deal are already staggering. Reuters previously reported Anthropic is seeking to raise as much as $100 billion — roughly four times larger than any IPO in history — with Nvidia in talks to commit up to $10 billion as an anchor investor, following the template of Nvidia and Amazon anchoring Arm’s listing and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund anchoring SpaceX. The company closed a $65 billion Series H at a $965 billion post-money valuation before filing, has been expanding a pre-IPO revolving credit facility toward $15 billion, and reported its first profitable quarter this summer on a run-rate investors project could reach $100–120 billion in annualized revenue by year’s end.

None of the timing is final, and sources consistently caveat that all details remain subject to change. But with the venue chosen, the anchor discussions advanced, and the calendar aligned, the biggest question left for Anthropic’s bankers is no longer logistics. It is whether public-market investors, at this particular moment in the AI risk conversation, are ready to buy a $2 trillion ticket on the future of Claude.