Jay Ritter “Mr. IPO” flags Anthropic IPO valuation risks

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Learn more Anthropic is preparing for a stock market debut that could rank among the largest technology initial public offerings (IPOs) ever, but its proposed valuation is already…

Anthropic is preparing for a stock market debut that could rank among the largest technology initial public offerings (IPOs) ever, but its proposed valuation is already raising questions about how much investors stand to gain.

The five-year-old Claude maker set its IPO price range at $70 to $78 per share, Anthropic's amended S-1 filed November 10, 2026, showed.

Also read: Anthropic's IPO results in an unusual contradiction for investors

That range would give the company a fully diluted valuation of approximately $1.26 trillion to $1.41 trillion, the Wall Street Journal noted.

The question every buyer faces is whether a stock priced above $1 trillion on day one can still deliver meaningful percentage returns.

I asked Jay Ritter, Director of The IPO Initiative at the University of Florida, widely recognized as "Mr. IPO," that exact question weeks before Anthropic disclosed its pricing.

When I asked Ritter which numbers matter most to a retail buyer weighing an IPO, he pointed to total valuation rather than the per-share price. That number reveals how much growth is already priced in and how much room remains for a stock to appreciate, he explained.

He used Nvidia as his reference point, noting that the chipmaker went public in January 1999 with a market value of about $350 million at the offer price.

Nvidia now commands a market value above $4 trillion, translating to a return exceeding 10,000% from that initial offering price, Ritter noted.

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