Anthropic, the company behind the Claude AI models, made its IPO filing public on Monday 26 October 2026: a Form S-1 registration statement filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission to list Class A shares on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the symbol “ANT”. The prospectus leaves the price range and the number of shares blank. Crypto traders had a number anyway. Hyperliquid’s ANTH perpetual contract jumped to about $1,980 around 13:00 UTC, as the filing was expected, then fell about 6% to roughly $1,857 within minutes, according to CoinDesk.
That contract, like the Anthropic products listed by OKX for European users and by Trade.xyz, is not a share. These are cash-settled derivatives on an estimated company valuation. They give no stock, no allocation in the Anthropic IPO and no vote, and the S-1 does not mention any of them: we searched the whole filing for perpetuals, tokenized securities, special purpose vehicles and prediction markets and found nothing.
Anthropic IPO filing: what the S-1 says and what it leaves blank
The offering covers Class A common stock sold both by the company and by existing holders, the “selling stockholders”. The cover page reads “between $ and $” where the price range should be, and the registration statement is not yet effective. The legend on the first page is plain: “These securities may not be sold until the registration statement filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission is effective.” Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley head the list of underwriters on the cover, and the final price will be set by negotiation between Anthropic, the selling holders and the underwriters. The company announced the filing on its own news page the same day, after a confidential draft in June.
For the first time the public sees the company’s full accounts. Revenue rose from $41 million in 2023 to $4.585 billion in 2025, then reached $16.286 billion in the first half of 2026 alone, against $1.163 billion a year earlier. Most of that came in the second quarter: $11.555 billion, according to the unaudited quarterly table, which also shows a first operating profit, $974 million. Over the half year the company still lost money on operations, and its net loss is inflated by an accounting effect tied to its own rising valuation.
| Item (S-1, statement of operations) | Amount |
|---|---|
| Revenue, 2023 | $41 million |
| Revenue, 2024 | $386 million |
| Revenue, 2025 | $4,585 million |
| Revenue, first half 2025 | $1,163 million |
| Revenue, first half 2026 | $16,286 million |
| Operating loss, first half 2026 | $693 million |
| Net loss, first half 2026 | $80,748 million |
| of which change in fair value of convertible notes, derivatives and SAFEs | $72,388 million |
| Cash and cash equivalents, 30 June 2026 | $112.4 billion |
The $72.4 billion line is a non-cash charge: convertible notes and similar instruments are carried at fair value, so their cost rises with the company’s paper value.
Founders and a trust keep control, whatever Class A buyers own
“We have a novel capital and corporate governance structure,” the prospectus says on its cover. Anthropic is a Delaware public benefit corporation. A Long-Term Benefit Trust holds Class T stock, which lets it elect and remove the Class T directors, who will form a majority of the board. A single share of Class F stock, to be issued just before the listing to a “Founder LLC” whose members are Dario and Daniela Amodei and five other co-founders, will carry 50.1% of the total voting power on matters put to stockholders generally, including the election of the directors the trust does not choose. Neither Class T nor Class F has economic rights.
Class A shares, the ones offered on Nasdaq, carry one vote each. Class N shares, held mostly by strategic partners, carry none and become Class A when sold to an unaffiliated third party. Because of the trust, Anthropic will be a “controlled company” under Nasdaq rules, and the risk factors warn that the multi-class structure may make the stock ineligible for some indices, which would keep passive funds that track them out.
A buyer of Class A stock after the listing gets economic exposure and a small vote, but no say over who runs the company. A holder of a pre-IPO perpetual gets neither.
No valuation in the filing: the $1.5 to $2 trillion figures come from the press
No valuation target appears in the prospectus; the trillion-dollar numbers in circulation are reporting. The Wall Street Journal reported that Anthropic could raise $100 billion or more at a valuation of $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion, according to The Next Web, which said it had not verified that figure. CoinDesk cited the Financial Times as saying investors expect $1.5 trillion to $1.75 trillion.
The last private price is in the filing. Between May and June 2026 Anthropic sold 77,637,878 shares of Series H-1 redeemable convertible preferred stock at $589.0095 each, for $45.7 billion; with the non-voting Series H-2 shares sold at the same price, the round raised $65.2 billion. When it announced the round in May, Anthropic put its post-money value at $965 billion. Forkast put the February 2026 Series G at about $380 billion.
Timing is also press reporting, not filing. The Journal said Anthropic aims to list in the week of 16 November, per The Next Web. CoinDesk relayed Fox Business anchor Liz Claman as saying 19 or 20 November. Forkast wrote that the roadshow could start as early as 9 November. Anthropic has confirmed none of these dates.
What one share might be worth: our check of the arithmetic
There is no post-offering share count in the filing, but one passage lets a reader estimate the current one. Anthropic says it contributed 846,840,960 Class N shares to its Anthropic Public Benefit Fund, “representing 5% of our fully diluted shares as of June 30, 2026”, assuming full conversion of the Amazon notes. Those figures already reflect the 10-for-1 forward split of Class A and Class N stock carried out on 17 September 2026, and the filing says the conversion rate of the preferred stock was adjusted in proportion.
By our own calculation, 5% equal to 846.8 million shares puts the fully diluted total at about 16.9 billion as of 30 June. The filing gives a 10-to-1 conversion ratio for the Series H-1 preferred at that date, so each $589.0095 share becomes ten common shares, or about $58.90 per common share, and $965 billion spread over 16.9 billion shares gives about $57, which is consistent. On the same basis a $1.9 trillion company would be worth about $112 a share. This is Coindaro’s estimate, not an official count: the shares Anthropic sells in the offering, and later option and RSU settlements, will change it.
What a pre-IPO perp is, and why venues quote different prices
A perpetual future is a derivative with no expiry date that tracks a reference price; our glossary entry on perpetual futures explains funding and margin. A pre-IPO version has a problem: there is no public price to track. Venues build an index from an estimated valuation, or let their own order book set the price, and settle gains and losses in dollars or stablecoins. Nothing is backed by Anthropic stock.
OKX: EEA users only, and ten billion assumed shares
OKX listed ANTHROPICUSD and OPENAIUSD “Pre-IPO X-Perps” in early September. Its specification page describes them as USD-settled expiry futures that trade around the clock, with funding fixed at 0% and settled every eight hours. Each contract assumes 10,000,000,000 shares “pending official disclosure”, so before any adjustment one unit is worth about one ten-billionth of the company’s estimated market value.
Access is limited to eligible users in the European Economic Area. According to OKX’s explainer for EEA users, they pass identity checks and then an appropriateness assessment for derivatives under MiFID II, on an execution-only basis, through OKX Europe Markets Limited, which is regulated by the Malta Financial Services Authority. Leverage goes up to 10x: in OKX’s own example, 1,000 USD of margin controls a 10,000 USD position, so a 5% move is worth 500 USD either way. OKX says holders get no shares, no IPO allocation and no voting rights. The legal basis is the derivatives framework, not MiCA, which these pages do not mention. Our review of OKX covers its European licences.
Two clauses matter now that the S-1 is out. Once the company publishes official pre-listing disclosure with the real share count, OKX will “rebase” the contract in proportion so that position values stay the same. The EEA explainer adds that trading is suspended while this happens, that pending take-profit and stop-loss orders are cancelled and not carried over, and that bots may be stopped. And “OKX does not guarantee that the underlying reference asset of the X-Perps will ultimately complete an IPO.” If the listing is cancelled, OKX may delist the contract or settle it at its own discretion, possibly far from a trader’s entry price. After a listing, the contracts are to be gradually converted into standard stock expiry futures.
Trade.xyz’s ANT and Hyperliquid’s ANTH are two different markets
Trade.xyz has opened an ANT contract that offers up to 10x leverage without equity ownership, The Defiant reported on Monday. Trade.xyz runs its perpetuals on Hyperliquid as a HIP-3 deployment, margined and settled in USDC, according to its documentation. We did not find an official specification page for ANT, its oracle or its fees. The ticker can mislead: ANT is also the symbol Anthropic has requested on Nasdaq, and the contract is not that stock. Trade.xyz’s general disclaimer bars access to United States persons and other restricted jurisdictions and warns of a substantial risk of loss.
ANTH, the market CoinDesk quoted on Monday, is a separate contract on Hyperliquid, the perpetuals exchange. It traded about $12 million over 24 hours, according to CoinDesk. That is thin for a price that outlets translate into an implied value near $1.9 trillion.
Trade.xyz and Hyperliquid’s policy arm asked the SEC on 18 August for a framework for “IPOPs”, their name for pre-IPO perpetuals, including retail access. No SEC reply has been reported. The same policy group has since sent the agency other requests, as covered in our report on Hyperliquid’s five asks on Regulation Crypto Assets.
Same valuation, different contract prices
Because each venue picks its own share count, the number on the screen is not comparable from one platform to the next, and none of them is a share price. Below, our arithmetic for a $1.9 trillion valuation.
| Convention | Assumed shares | Price for a $1.9 trillion valuation |
|---|---|---|
| OKX X-Perps (OKX specification) | 10 billion | about $190 per unit |
| Contracts quoted near 1,900 that the press reads as about $1.9 trillion, such as ANTH | about 1 billion (implied by that reading) | about $1,900 |
| Fully diluted count implied by the S-1 (our estimate) | about 16.9 billion | about $112 per share |
Tokenized “Anthropic shares” are a different product, and Anthropic says such transfers are void
A second family of products claims more than a price: tokens said to represent Anthropic shares, usually through a special purpose vehicle that buys stock and issues tokens against it. On Monday, Base promoted “tokenized Anthropic shares” without identifying an issuer or a token contract, according to The Defiant and ChainCatcher. We found no post from Base or Coinbase that names the product, and it is not known who issues it or what backs it.
Anthropic’s position predates the filing. In a stock-transfer warning updated on 12 May 2026, as reported by Decrypt and CoinMarketCap Academy, the company said unapproved sales or transfers of its stock or any interest in it are void and will not be recorded, and that it does not allow SPVs to hold its shares. Sellers offering direct sales, forward contracts or tokenized securities are “likely either engaged in fraud or offering an investment that may have no value,” Anthropic said, as quoted by CoinMarketCap Academy. The warning named eight platforms as not authorised, including Hiive and Forge Global. Forge said it does not move private company shares without approval, and Hiive said the issuer approves every transfer it handles, Quartz reported on 15 May.
CoinMarketCap Academy also looked at PreStocks, a Solana-based issuer of SPV tokens, in May. According to that report, the Anthropic token implied a valuation above $1.3 trillion while the vehicle held about $23 million in assets, that promised attestation reports had not been published and that the product excludes residents of the US, Singapore and the EU. Coindaro could not check those figures independently.
The prospectus adds one detail. A right of first refusal that lets Anthropic buy shares its stockholders propose to sell “will terminate upon completion of this offering”. After the listing, ordinary Class A shares will trade on Nasdaq, subject to lock-ups for existing holders. What happens then to tokens issued by vehicles Anthropic never approved is not addressed in the filing or by any issuer we found.
Who can trade these contracts from the US, the EU, France or Italy
US persons are shut out of Trade.xyz by its own terms, and we found no SEC approval of any pre-IPO perpetual. In the EEA, OKX offers its contracts only to users who pass the MiFID II appropriateness test through its Maltese entity. PreStocks, by CoinMarketCap Academy’s account, excludes EU residents.
We found no statement from ESMA, the French AMF or Italy’s Consob about these Anthropic contracts or about tokenized Anthropic shares. OKX runs its contracts through a MiFID II investment firm, not under a MiCA crypto licence.
What can go wrong: rebase, thin books, delisting and leverage
The risks are set out in the venues’ own documents, and some are already visible.
- There is no ownership: no shares, no IPO allocation, no vote and no claim on Anthropic.
- The price comes from a thin order book. OKX warns that its market price may differ materially from private funding round valuations or from the eventual IPO price, and ANTH moved about 6% within minutes around the filing, according to CoinDesk.
- A rebase is coming. When the amended S-1 gives a share count, OKX may pause trading and cancel or adjust orders.
- At the maximum 10x, a move of about 10% against the position wipes out the margin, and liquidation can come earlier.
- If the IPO does not go ahead, OKX may delist the contract and settle open positions at a final price it determines.
Perpetuals on assets whose home market is closed have already produced sharp swings. In October, chip stock contracts lost $51.6 million in ten minutes while Wall Street was shut, as told in our report on the chip perps crash. In August, Crypto Briefing, citing Bloomberg, put the value implied by these contracts at about $1.8 trillion; on 17 September Euronews reported a Hyperliquid-implied peak of roughly $2.36 trillion. Those marks compare with $965 billion at the last private round and press talk of $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion for the listing.
Next dates: the price range, the rebase and the roadshow
The next filing to watch is an amended S-1 with a price range and a share count. It is the document that would trigger OKX’s rebase, and the one that would let anyone compare a contract mark with a real per-share price. The press has pointed to a roadshow from about 9 November and a listing in the week of 16 November, possibly on 19 or 20 November; none of it is confirmed by Anthropic.
After a listing, OKX plans to convert its contracts into ordinary stock expiry futures. Trade.xyz and Hyperliquid have not said how ANT and ANTH would settle. The SEC has not answered the August letter on pre-IPO perpetuals.
1 comment