Breaking: Kraken Opens Anthropic IPO Requests - But This Major IPO Deserves a Careful Read

Kraken has opened requests for the Anthropic IPO, letting eligible customers outside the US ask for ANTx, a token that tracks Anthropic’s Class A shares, at the offering price plus a 5% spread. The exchange announced it in an email sent to customers at 19:36 Central European Time on Tuesday 10 November, hours after Anthropic launched the roadshow for its Nasdaq listing.

The email builds its case on Claude’s popularity and Anthropic’s largest customers, and the margins, compute commitments, governance and risk warnings that our earlier coverage examined are the part of the offer that sits in the prospectus.

ANTx costs the offering price plus a 5% spread

ANTx is issued through xStocks, the tokenized equities framework that Kraken’s parent company, Payward, took over when it bought Backed Finance, and it follows the model that financial technology firms have used to sell listed shares as tokens. The token gives price exposure only, with no voting or dividend rights, and it is issued by Backed Assets (JE) Limited under a prospectus registered in the European Union.

Kraken’s Anthropic IPO page sets the price as the institutional offering price plus a 5% spread and adds that other fees may apply. That puts the cost of one ANTx between $73.50 and $81.90 on Anthropic’s expected range of $70 to $78 a share, a The Bright Minded calculation based on the range and the spread. Customers in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia are excluded, while those in the European Economic Area (EEA) can trade filled tokens 24 hours a day, five days a week, with no lock-up.

Fills are not first come, first served. Anthropic and its underwriters decide which requests are filled, so a customer can receive the full amount, part of it or nothing, and Kraken returns the money for any unfilled part.

Kraken Borrow lets customers request more than their cash

The email pairs the offer with Kraken Borrow, which lets customers fund a request with their cash plus the amount their eligible holdings can cover as collateral, so they do not have to sell assets to ask for more. Kraken’s own warning in the same email says borrowing increases risk, that customers could lose more than their own funds, and that their collateral may be sold. The email does not explain how borrowing costs apply to the part of a request that ends up unfilled, a detail customers can check before confirming.

What Anthropic has confirmed about the offering

Anthropic announced the roadshow on 10 November for 825 million Class A shares, of which 801,351,354 are new shares sold by the company and 23,648,646 come from existing stockholders, at an expected $70 to $78 each. It has applied to list on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker ANT and expects to give its underwriters a 30-day option to buy up to 123,750,000 additional shares. The 825 million shares would raise about $64.4 billion at the top of the range, a Bright Minded calculation that includes the selling stockholders’ portion.

The announcement gives no pricing or trading date. CNBC, citing people familiar with the details, reported that Anthropic expects to price the offering on 18 November and begin trading on 19 November, and that it is targeting a retail allocation of about 20%, well above what a typical IPO reserves for individual investors.

What the SpaceX offering showed about tokenized fills

Kraken ran the same model for SpaceX in June, when allocations were pro rata, as we explained in our tokenized IPO explainer, and each request was cut in proportion to total demand. Four distribution platforms cancelled their SpaceX subscriptions on listing morning and refunded customers, because xStocks, which had gathered more than $1 billion in customer orders across its partners, could not deliver the underlying shares.

Kraken, which runs xStocks directly, received only part of what its customers requested, with reported allocations of about 4.3 shares per subscriber, as our SpaceX day-one report recorded. The SpaceX retail tranche had also been cut from an initial 30% to the low 20% range before the book closed. A retail target of about 20% for Anthropic would sit in the range SpaceX ended at, which makes the size of that tranche the number that decides how much ANTx Kraken’s customers receive.

What the figures in Kraken’s email leave to the prospectus

We have followed Anthropic’s road to this listing since its confidential filing in June, and our coverage points to one practical conclusion for anyone weighing a request: the marketing and the headline figures are the first layer of this offering, and the rest of it sits in the prospectus. We argued in September that safety had become a competitive marketing asset for frontier AI companies. We also noted that, in our opinion, the Coxon resignation reached a global audience at a convenient pre-IPO moment for a brand built on responsibility, while stressing that the public has no independent way to verify what AI leaders say about risk.

Kraken’s email draws on that first layer. It describes Claude as a household name used by millions and cites about 250 businesses spending more than $10 million a year with Anthropic and more than 11,900 spending over $100,000, figures that match Anthropic’s own filing, while the risk warning in the body of the email concerns borrowing.

The filing places those customers next to the cost of serving them. Our S-1 analysis showed that Anthropic reported operating income of $974 million in the second quarter of 2026, an 8% margin, while the first half as a whole still showed an operating loss of $693 million and the company carries about $417 billion in minimum future compute payments. It also flags that a small group of customers drives much of the revenue, and it warns, across more than 90 pages of risk factors, that advanced AI could pose catastrophic or existential risks, language we first examined when the filing leaked in September.

The price investors are asked to pay has moved as well. Anthropic had been eyeing a valuation of around $2 trillion as recently as September, according to an earlier draft filing reported by Yahoo Finance, and today’s range values it at up to about $1.4 trillion on a fully diluted basis, as CNBC reported, after major investors told The Wall Street Journal that the figure would need to come down following a sell-off in AI stocks.

The control question has not changed. Class A buyers get one vote per share in a structure where a single founders’ share carries 50.1% of the voting power and a trust elects a majority of the board, and ANTx holders get no vote at all. We wrote in October that the Public Benefit Fund shares Anthropic’s wealth on terms the company sets, and a token that offers price exposure without a say repeats that arrangement for retail buyers outside the US.

Kraken’s email presents the strongest parts of Anthropic’s story, Claude’s reach and its biggest customers, and those figures come from Anthropic’s own filing. The compute commitments, the customer concentration, the voting structure and the existential risk warnings come from that document too, so the marketing and the prospectus need reading together.

Editor’s note
Every piece goes through careful verification, but mistakes can happen. Readers who spot an error or have additional information can write to rosalia@thebrightminded.com.

Disclaimer
This article is for information and analysis only and does not constitute financial, investment or legal advice.