SBF gave up his Anthropic stake. Next week it's a $37B miss

Anthropic is set to list on the Nasdaq around November 19 under the ticker ANT, with its updated S-1 pricing shares between $70 and $78. At the top of that range, the AI giant lands a fully diluted valuation of roughly $1.5 trillion. That's a step down from the up-to-$2 trillion originally floated, after a recent shakeup in the AI space.

The debut turns a brutal what-if into a hard number. Sam Bankman-Fried's Alameda Research Ventures put $500 million into Anthropic in 2021, taking nearly 14% of the lab when it was valued at around $4 billion. He forfeited the stake in 2024, and the FTX bankruptcy estate sold it for roughly $1.34 billion — about $884 million in the March and April phase and roughly $452 million in June.

Thirty-eight buyers split the holdings at about $30 per share. The largest single slice, $500 million, went to ATIC Third International Investment, a firm tied to Abu Dhabi's Mubadala. The sale still delivered more than $800 million in gains for Bankman-Fried. Kept until now, the shares would be worth around $37 billion, or 74 times their original purchase price.

The fire sale didn't stop at Anthropic. Alameda's $200,000 early-2022 bet on Anysphere, the company behind AI coding tool Cursor, was liquidated at cost during the 2023 bankruptcy. His roughly 8% Robinhood stake, bought in 2022 for over $500 million, was repurchased by the trading app for $606 million in 2023 — shares worth roughly $4.5 billion today. In March 2024, a federal court sentenced him to 25 years in prison on seven counts of fraud and conspiracy and ordered him to forfeit $11 billion.

Anthropic's own numbers explain how the stake ballooned. The company reported $16.96 billion in third-quarter 2026 revenue, pushing the first nine months to $33.24 billion. Enterprise customers generating at least $100,000 a year on a trailing 12-month basis climbed past 11,900 by September 30, up from more than 950 a year earlier. The buildout is costly: a $567 million operating loss in Q3, against $974 million in operating income in Q2, plus about $900.9 billion in aggregate computing and infrastructure commitments, with roughly $451.6 billion expected before the end of 2030.

Alongside the listing, Anthropic has lined up a $26 billion placement with institutional investors including Google and Nvidia. It follows a May 2026 funding round that valued the company at $965 billion. A 10-for-1 stock split lifted the holding to roughly 445.4 million shares, about 2.5% of the fully diluted share count, worth between $30 billion and $45 billion depending on pricing and market performance. Anthropic's debut is also the next big test for AI stocks and could set the benchmark for rival OpenAI's IPO, expected early next year.