Korean Brokerages Sit Out Anthropic IPO After Being Left Without SpaceX Shares

None of the 22 financial institutions named in Anthropic's filing is Korean, and no domestic firm has publicly said it is taking part, according to the newspaper. It said the Financial Supervisory Service, the country's financial regulator, has received no underwriting filings related to the deal from local brokerages.

Anthropic filed its Form S-1 registration statement with the US Securities and Exchange Commission on October 26. The Korea Herald said the listing could value the company at about $2 trillion. Seoul Economic Daily reported last week that the market expects a valuation of between $1.5 trillion and $2 trillion, and the filing did not set out the number of shares or a price range.

The SpaceX Effect

The reluctance follows SpaceX's IPO in June. Mirae Asset Securities joined that deal's underwriting syndicate but received no shares to allocate to its clients, The Korea Herald said, a result that led to investor complaints and an on-site inspection by the financial regulator.

IPO allocations are usually distributed through members of the US underwriting syndicate. Without a Korean firm in the group, local investors may have to wait until Anthropic begins trading on Nasdaq and could miss any gains between the offer price and the first day of trading. "Unless brokerages are willing to take risks, Korea will remain on the sidelines of major global listings," a local brokerage official told the newspaper.

According to Seoul Economic Daily, which cited the S-1, Korea is not part of the public offering. The filing says shares have been offered and sold in Korea through private placement under the country's Financial Investment Services and Capital Markets Act, and will continue to be sold that way.

Japan Takes a Different Route

Japanese institutions have taken the opposite approach. They aim to raise a record $3.5 billion from domestic investors, led by Mizuho Securities, a member of the US syndicate, The Korea Herald reported. That would be about 60 per cent more than the $2.18 billion raised from Japanese investors for SpaceX.

Seoul Economic Daily, citing the S-1 as reported by Nikkei, said Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are the lead underwriters, with Mizuho Securities USA and MUFG Securities Americas also in the group. The filing lists public offerings in Japan, Australia, Canada, Switzerland, the UK and some European Economic Area countries.

For Korean investors, the other routes are limited. Local asset managers are preparing exchange-traded funds that will add Anthropic after it lists, though rebalancing could delay that exposure, The Korea Herald said. US-listed ETFs that already hold private Anthropic shares offer earlier access, but the company makes up only a small part of those funds. Buying shares in Anthropic's large public shareholders gives only indirect exposure.

Why It Matters

Anthropic's listing is set to be one of the largest ever, and how it is distributed shows which markets the big US banks treat as core. Korean retail investors are among the most active foreign buyers of US technology stocks, but their brokerages have no seat in the syndicate. Japan's banks, by contrast, have turned their place in the deal into a large domestic offering.