Anthropic wants up to $3.5 billion from investors in Japan, far more than SpaceX raised there

Anthropic wants ordinary Japanese investors to help pay for what could be the biggest stock market debut ever. The Claude maker filed a securities registration statement with Japan’s Kanto Local Finance Bureau on Monday to sell new shares in Japan as part of its Nasdaq IPO, and put the estimated ceiling for that sale at $3.5 billion (about ¥552.9 billion), Reuters reported from the filing.

That figure is a cap, not a promise. The filing says the final amount will be set on the pricing date and could differ significantly from the estimate, according to Japan’s Atarashii Keizai, which read it. When it was filed, the number of shares and the offer price were still undecided, and Anthropic had applied to list on Nasdaq but had not yet been approved.

Six brokers will take orders

Investors in Japan will be able to apply through six firms: Mizuho Securities, Goldman Sachs Japan, Mitsubishi UFJ Morgan Stanley Securities, Morgan Stanley MUFG Securities, Rakuten Securities and SBI Securities. Mizuho is coordinating the Japanese sale.

The list includes Japan’s two big online brokers, Rakuten and SBI, which puts the shares in front of individual investors, not only fund managers. Mizuho, Rakuten and SBI also handled SpaceX’s Japanese offering in June and sold those shares mainly to individuals, Nikkei reported.

Bigger than SpaceX’s Japan slice

If Anthropic sells the full amount, its Japanese tranche will dwarf SpaceX’s. Investors in Japan bought $2.2 billion of shares in SpaceX’s record-breaking June listing, according to Reuters, and Nikkei says Anthropic’s ceiling is about 60% higher. Nikkei calls it the largest Japanese IPO offering ever by a foreign company: Japan’s domestic IPOs raised a combined total of about ¥200 billion (about $1.3 billion) from April to September, according to research firm I N Information Center, so Anthropic alone could raise almost three times that.

The money from the new shares sold in Japan will go to working capital, operating costs and capital spending, the filing says. Anthropic’s public S-1, filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission on October 26, already said the IPO includes public offerings in Australia, Canada, Japan, Switzerland, the UK and some countries in the European Economic Area. Anthropic doesn’t plan to list on any exchange outside the US, so buyers in Japan will hold the same Nasdaq stock, under the ticker ANT.

A big bet on retail money

The Japanese filing is the first concrete sign of a wider push to sell to individuals as well as institutions. Bloomberg reported on October 27 that Anthropic is considering setting aside 15% to 20% of the IPO’s shares for retail investors, with JPMorgan leading sales to individual investors in the US and Citigroup coordinating retail sales elsewhere. The people it spoke to said the split could still change.

Neither the Japanese filing nor the S-1 says yet how big the whole IPO will be or what Anthropic thinks it is worth. Some investors have discussed a valuation of about $1.5 trillion, according to Reuters, down from the $2 trillion once floated, after Anthropic told would-be investors that its growth was cooling even as it made $16.8 billion in the third quarter. Nikkei expects the company to raise around $100 billion in total. The next filing to watch is an amended S-1 with a price range, which will put numbers on both.

Why it matters

Few tech listings court small investors this openly, and Japan’s brokerage apps are where SpaceX found $2.2 billion of demand in June. How much of the $3.5 billion ceiling Anthropic fills will be an early test of whether everyday buyers share Wall Street’s appetite for AI at these prices.

Sources: Anthropic securities registration statement, Kanto Local Finance Bureau (as reported by Reuters, Atarashii Keizai and Nikkei); Bloomberg (October 27, retail allocation); Anthropic, PBC Form S-1 (SEC).