Anthropic Hands Mizuho the Lead on a $3.5B Stock Sale to Japanese Buyers

Anthropic is courting Japanese money ahead of its Nasdaq bow. The Claude developer has assembled six local brokers to sell up to $3.5 billion — about ¥552.9 billion — of stock to investors in Japan, with Mizuho Securities serving as administrative lead manager. The securities registration statement landed with Japan's Kanto Local Finance Bureau and hit EDINET on November 2.

That $3.5 billion figure is the ceiling, not a done deal. The filing says the final size gets fixed on a future pricing date and could swing sharply from the top-end estimate. Both the share count and the price were left blank at submission. Joining Mizuho in taking orders are Goldman Sachs Securities, Mitsubishi UFJ Morgan Stanley Securities, Morgan Stanley MUFG Securities, Rakuten Securities and SBI Securities, with Mitsubishi UFJ Morgan Stanley listed as manager.

The listing itself is well down the runway. Anthropic confidentially handed the SEC a draft Form S-1 on June 1, then went public with the paperwork on October 26. Its Class A common stock is expected to begin trading on the Nasdaq Global Select Market as ANT — though the Japanese filing notes the listing has been applied for, not approved. Some investors have floated a valuation of roughly $1.5 trillion.

Japanese buyers have shown they will open their wallets for a marquee name. They snapped up $2.2 billion of the $75 billion SpaceX raised in its June IPO, the biggest offering ever. Anthropic's SEC filings also lay out public offerings in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Switzerland and certain European Economic Area member states. The company was founded in 2021 by Dario Amodei and a crew of former OpenAI researchers.

The proceeds have a long to-do list: working capital, operating costs, capital expenditures including computing resources and infrastructure, plus recruiting and keeping specialized staff. Anthropic said it could also put money into acquisitions or investments in other companies, products and technologies, though it confirmed no material deal of that kind is in place. According to Cryptopolitan, citing the public S-1, Anthropic pulled in $16.3 billion of revenue in the first six months of 2026, versus $1.2 billion a year earlier, while posting a $693 million operating loss.

Crypto traders already have a way to bet on the hype. On Hyperliquid, Entropy runs a perpetual futures contract called ANTH that tracks Anthropic's estimated valuation before the listing. Entropy is clear about what it isn't: the product is a derivative only, and holding it grants no share ownership, no voting rights, no dividends and no claim on an IPO allocation.