The shadow of Firmus's failure still lingerscan Anthropic come to the rescue? IPO opens to Australian investors, with retail investors and trillion-dollar pension funds waiting to enter.

Anthropic PBC will sell shares directly to Australian investors in its highly anticipated initial public offering. According to a filing submitted to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Monday, Australian retail investors will be able to participate in the offering once a prospectus is lodged with the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC); the exact number of shares to be offered will be disclosed in subsequent filings. People familiar with the matter said investors expect a reasonable valuation range of US$1.4 trillion to US$1.75 trillion. This is a deal destined for the history booksaccording to multiple media tallies, Anthropic plans to raise up to about US$100 billion, which would surpass SpaceX's US$86 billion fundraising record in June this year and make it the largest IPO ever; the company will list on Nasdaq under the ticker ANT, with the market widely expecting trading to begin in mid-November. For Australia, the significance goes beyond simply "getting a piece of the action." Why Australia? A market lacking AI names Australia's direct access this time comes against the backdrop of a local capital market that has long lacked core AI assets. Compared with the technology hubs of North America and Northeast Asia, Australia has none of the semiconductor companies or hyperscale cloud providers that have dominated global stock markets this year, leaving local investors without direct exposurea gap that explains the strong reception for SpaceX's Australian offering this year. The SpaceX precedent provides a quantitative reference: CommSec, the broker responsible for its Australian marketing, received more than 28,000 applications at the time, a record for the platform (the broker did not disclose the final number of shares allocated to clients). Australia's pension industry, worth about A$4.8 trillion (US$3.4 trillion), is the main institutional target for this offering. Josh Gilbert, chief analyst for Asia-Pacific at eToro, judges that after "the loudest names in AI spent years developing behind closed doors," this offering "should attract strong local interest"; compared with a highly debt-dependent expansion story like Firmus, Anthropic's numbers put it on firmer ground and offer something public markets have almost never haddirect exposure to a frontier model developer. The shadow of Firmus: the deal that collapsed just half a month ago This offering comes as "the Australian market is still reeling from the collapse of a data center deal"Firmus Grid. The Nvidia-backed AI data center company had planned to become Australia's largest IPO in nearly three decades: priced at A$11 per share, raising up to US$5.5 billion at a valuation of about A$43.7 billion (about US$30.4 billion), with listing originally set for October 23. But demand weakened markedly during bookbuildingsome potential investors worried about supply pressure from existing shareholders selling quickly after listing, and questioned a price nearly three times the valuation from an August private funding round (US$10.5 billion). According to reports, underwriters at one point considered cutting the price to around A$8 per share. Firmus ultimately announced on October 9 that it was withdrawing its ASX listing application, citing "recent market volatility and current market conditions," and turned to private-market fundraising. The company started out in 2019 as a bitcoin miner; of its roughly 1 gigawatt pipeline, only about 42 megawatts has actually been built. Local institutions responded coolly, with a Morningstar analyst describing it as having "boom-era" characteristics and another fund saying bluntly, "we have difficulty with the fundamental arithmetic." Shares of its shareholder Maas Group plunged as much as 30% intraday that day. It is precisely this contrast that forms the core argument of Cameron Gleeson, head of investment strategy at BetaShares: "Many Australian investors will be keen to participate in Anthropic's IPO. Anthropic is a completely different proposition from FirmusAnthropic sells products that customers are already paying for and spending more and more on." Anthropic's books: "paying customers" holds up The prospectus discloses for the first time the full financial picture of the Claude developer. Revenue in the first half of 2026 was US$16.286 billion, compared with US$1.16 billion a year earlier; revenue previously grew from US$41 million in 2023 to US$386 million in 2024 and US$4.59 billion in 2025. Second-quarter revenue alone reached US$11.56 billion, and the company posted its first quarterly operating profit of US$974 million. Although the overall loss is huge, it stems mainly from accounting rather than cash spending: the net loss of US$80.748 billion in the first half included about US$72.388 billion arising from changes in the fair value of financial instruments such as convertible notes as the company's valuation rose; the operating loss for the period was only US$693 million, adjusted operating profit was US$1.62 billion, operating cash flow turned positive at US$3.93 billion, and cash and short-term investments totaled US$131.65 billion as of June 30. This is indeed structurally different from a build-out story like Firmus that depends on external financing. The customer side is equally solid: as of September 30, more than 1,900 customers had spent more than US$1 million over the past 12 months and more than 11,900 had spent more than US$100,000 (compared with 950 on the prior-year basis), net revenue retention was 900%, and more than half of Fortune 500 companies are customers. The cost is an extremely heavy compute bill: compute and infrastructure spending in the first half was about US$8.9 billion, and future compute commitments range from US$518 billion to more than US$600 billion depending on the measurement basis. Macquarie leads, CommSec plays the retail card again The underwriting syndicate is large. According to Australian media citing people familiar with the matter, the capital raising division of Macquarie Group is expected to lead the Australian portion of the offering, while CommSec, the brokerage arm of Commonwealth Bank of Australia, will lead retail marketingthe same firm that ran the Australian marketing for SpaceX. Note the division of roles: Macquarie is the lead underwriter, while CommSec handles retail-facing marketing and distribution; they are not the same role. In addition, because the S-1 has not yet provided a price range, the Australian prospectus has still not been lodged with ASIC; based on the SpaceX experience, it takes about a week from setting the price range to finalizing the Australian documents, and local pricing, allocations and distribution arrangements all remain unknown. The regulatory stance has already been set. ASIC said it is taking a "pragmatic and constructive" approach to the offering, consistent with how it handled SpaceX's June IPO, but requires substantive disclosure on local risks, governance differences and investor rights. The disclosure documents Australian investors receive will consist of the U.S. registration document plus an Australia-specific supplement. This is not a formality: Anthropic's governance structure is unusuala single Class F share held collectively by seven founders controls 50.1% of shareholder voting power, a majority of board seats are elected by a trust, a public benefit fund holds 5% of non-voting shares, and the founders have pledged to donate 80% of their personal holdings. What retail investors get is economic return, not control. The offering also covers Japan, Canada, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and parts of Europe; Australia is one of the few markets where retail investors can participate directly. Professional investors need not wait: two paths to participate Under the prospectus arrangements, professional and sophisticated investors can participate directly in Anthropic's U.S. offering without waiting for Australian regulatory documents. Large institutional investors such as pension funds fall into the professional investor category; the statutory threshold for sophisticated investors is net assets of at least A$2.5 million, or annual income of at least A$250,000. Local broker IG Australia has already launched a channel allowing traders to subscribe for individual shares. Its managing director, Michael Jones, said Australian retail investors have historically found it hard to get allocations in large U.S. IPOs; Anthropic trading on its CFD market has grown more than 27-fold since launch, with early indicative demand even stronger than for SpaceX that year. Morningstar, meanwhile, flags the timing factor: the offering falls after the U.S. midterm elections, when policy direction and the AI sector's earnings picture are clearer, which may actually be a favorable aspect. In other words, Australian institutional money has long had a way inwhat is opening this time is the channel for "ordinary people," and that is precisely where market sentiment is most delicate: it carries both the record retail demand set by SpaceX and the psychological scars left by Firmus's failure. The risks are there as well. The prospectus itself warns that rapid revenue growth "cannot be guaranteed to continue to any degree"; customer concentration is relatively high, with two unnamed customers accounting for about 23% of first-half revenue, or the top five customers about 25% with no single customer exceeding 10%, depending on the reporting basis. Nigel Green, chief executive of deVere Group, described it as "a referendum on the entire AI trade": if the listing surges, more AI companies will line up to go public; if it falters, tech valuations could reprice quickly. Lightshed put it more starklyAnthropic "could become the most valuable company in the world, or it could end up bankrupt." For Australia, there is also a dimension beyond finance: Anthropic has already named Australia in its prospectus as the only signed data center capacity location outside North America explicitly identified, and has publicly lobbied for changes to local copyright rules, calling this a precondition for advancing multibillion-dollar data center investment. Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) became a strategic investor in Anthropic as early as 2025, and its annual report disclosed that the stake was valued at US$1.5 billion at the end of June.