Claude’s Maker Prices Its Stock at $70 to $78. Regular Investors Could Get One in Five Shares.

For most of the SI boom, regular people watched from the bleachers. The companies building the chatbots were private, and the only way in was to be a big fund, a tech giant, or an insider with the right connections. That changes next week. Anthropic, the company behind the Claude chatbot, put a price on its stock Tuesday, and it’s setting aside an unusually big slice for ordinary investors.

In an updated filing, Anthropic said it will sell 825 million shares at $70 to $78 apiece, according to CNBC. The plan is to set the final price on Wednesday, Nov. 18, and start trading on the Nasdaq the next day under the ticker “ANT.” At the top of that range, the company would be worth about $1.4 trillion counting stock options and similar shares, or roughly $1 trillion without them.

One in five shares for the little guy

The part that matters most for a regular investor is the split. People familiar with the plan told CNBC that Anthropic is aiming to hand about 20% of the offering to individual investors. A typical stock debut sets aside 5% to 10% for them. SpaceX did something similar with its record-setting offering about five months ago, steering roughly 20% to individuals.

Those shares go out through the brokerage apps a lot of people already use. Anthropic said in a Nov. 2 filing that it is giving some shares to customers of Charles Schwab, Fidelity, Robinhood, SoFi and E*Trade. You generally don’t need to be a rich, “accredited” investor to ask for them. But each broker sets its own rules, and they aren’t the same.

Fidelity, for one, requires at least $25,000 in certain assets with the firm, according to its Anthropic offering guide. The smallest request it takes is 25 shares, which works out to $1,750 at the bottom of the price range and $1,950 at the top. Its window for requests is expected to close Tuesday, Nov. 17, at 4 p.m. Eastern. SoFi, by contrast, has no account minimum but requires a particular type of account.

Asking doesn’t mean getting. Brokers only receive a small share of the total, and when demand runs hot, many customers get fewer shares than they asked for, or none. “We only get a limited number of shares for each IPO,” Robinhood says on its website. Fidelity adds a catch for anyone hoping to make a quick buck: sell within 15 days and you may lose your shot at future offerings through the firm.

A lower price on purpose

The number Anthropic picked is big, but it’s smaller than what was floating around this fall. The company raised money in May at a $965 billion value. A couple of months ago it was reportedly eyeing as much as $2 trillion, according to TechCrunch, and an earlier version of the filing showed the sale raising up to $69.3 billion. The new range brings the top figure down to about $64.4 billion.

Some on Wall Street think that’s a smart move rather than a sign of weakness. “By seeking a valuation close to 20 per cent below ‘market expectations’, this allows investors to ‘bid up’ the IPO rather than facing a take-it-or-leave-it scenario like SpaceX took,” Jeff Zell, a senior analyst at IPO Boutique, said, according to a Reuters report carried by CNA. Translation: price it a bit low, let demand push it up, and the first day looks like a win.

Demand doesn’t look like a problem so far. People familiar with the deal told CNBC that interest from big institutions is even stronger than it was for SpaceX at the same point.

The timing is touchy. Tech stocks have been wobbly, with Nvidia leading a sharp drop, and Federal Reserve Governor Michelle Bowman warned Tuesday that stocks could fall hard if the money pouring into SI doesn’t pay off. Bloomberg reported that two investment firms even want to launch funds that let people bet on SI companies defaulting on their debts. A smooth Anthropic debut would calm a lot of nerves. A flop would rattle them.

The big chipmakers are buying, too

Alongside the public sale, Anthropic struck a deal to sell $26 billion in a separate class of nonvoting stock at the IPO price to AMD, Broadcom, Google, Micron, Microsoft, Nvidia and TSMC, according to TechCrunch. Google and Nvidia are putting in $10 billion each. Add it all up and Anthropic expects to bring in somewhere between $84.6 billion and $93.7 billion, the high end if the banks running the sale, led by Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, buy the extra 123.75 million shares they have an option on.

There’s fine print to read before anyone clicks “buy,” too. Owning Anthropic stock won’t mean having much say in how Anthropic is run. The company is set up as a public benefit corporation, and its founders hold a special class of stock with 50.1% of the votes. A separate group called the Long-Term Benefit Trust also picks most of the board. People buying the ordinary Class A shares are along for the ride, not steering it.

That’s not unusual for a founder-run tech company. Plenty of household names give their founders outsized control. But a trillion-dollar price tag buys a piece of the profits, if they come, and not a seat at the table.

For a lot of families, this will be the first time an SI lab has been something they could actually own a piece of. The price is set, the brokers are taking requests, and the bell rings on Nov. 19. Whether it’s a good buy is a different question, and one each investor has to answer with their own money and their own tolerance for a bumpy ride.