Mutual Funds Hold More Than $15 Billion of Anthropic Shares Ahead of Its IPO

The figure is probably an undercount, because some private funds do not disclose their holdings, Bloomberg said. Even so, it shows how far ownership of the Claude developer has spread beyond venture capital firms and big technology partners and into the funds that sit in ordinary retirement and brokerage accounts. Those funds stand to gain or lose heavily depending on the price Anthropic achieves when it goes public.

Capital Group is by far the largest holder identified, with stakes worth at least $9 billion across several funds. Two of them, the Growth Fund of America, which manages $342 billion, and Fundamental Investors, with $176 billion, together own more than $7 billion of Anthropic shares, according to the analysis.

Fidelity's holdings are worth at least $2 billion. Its Select Technology Portfolio, with about $37 billion in assets, reported roughly $1 billion of Anthropic stock at the end of September, while Fidelity Contrafund, a $174 billion fund, held a stake worth about $600 million at the same date, well above what it paid. BlackRock has positions worth at least $500 million across some of its retail funds, and Franklin Templeton holds a small stake, Bloomberg said.

Fidelity, Capital Group and BlackRock declined to comment on their holdings.

The value of those stakes will be set by the listing. Investors have told bankers a valuation of about $1.75 trillion is possible, though shifting sentiment toward AI stocks has pushed the discussed range as low as $1.4 trillion, according to Bloomberg. Anthropic's most recent private funding round valued it at $965 billion.

The company has disclosed quarterly revenue of nearly $17 billion, a twelvefold increase, and said it intends to spend more than $895 billion in the coming years on computing power and infrastructure. That spending, and wider investor caution about AI valuations, mean the offering is not guaranteed to go ahead on the terms now being discussed.

Dan Ives of Yorkville Ives & Co. said that despite market jitters, investors "will give it the benefit of the doubt."

Bloomberg did not give a listing date. The pricing range that Anthropic and its bankers settle on will determine whether the funds' marks hold, and how much of the gap between the last private valuation and the public price flows to these early mutual fund backers.