NEW YORK
Canadian investors hoping to get a piece of Anthropic PBC's initial public offering will need a little luck, with American underwriters controlling the deal's order book and final share allocations out of New York, according to three sources familiar with the offerings.
"In other words, it's more of a traditional wait-and-see approach," the sources said.
While it is possible that Canadian investors will get access to shares, particularly large institutional investors such as insurers and pension funds, the amounts allocated will ultimately depend on total demand.
For a hot IPO that has orders for far more shares than the company plans to sell, the banks tend to allocate shares to the clients that pay the most and with which they have deep relationships.
That means hedge funds and pension plans that pay significant commissions to dealers for trades and research are likely to get their orders filled first, while retail investors may only get a small fraction of the shares they requested.
Anthropic started marketing its IPO this week, with hopes of raising as much as US$90-billion.
Three Canadian investment banks are serving as underwriters: Royal Bank of Canada, BMO Nesbitt Burns and TD Securities.
That means these banks will earn a fee and their clients are likely to have a greater chance of getting access to some shares.
Anthropic has also filed the regulatory paperwork to sell shares to retail investors in Canada beyond these three banks, and some shares may be available to clients of CIBC World Markets, Scotia Capital and Wealthsimple.
The company is offering a fifth of its IPO to individual investors, which widens access to the deal, but analysts warn the structure may favour the company more than the buyers.
Anthropic expects to allocate up to 20 percent of the Class A shares in its initial public offering to retail investors.
That is an unusually large share, and it could give individuals wider access to one of the year's biggest listings.
Analysts said the decision largely reflects the scale of the deal, with one analyst noting that at a potential valuation of $1.4 trillion to $2 trillion, the volume of stock to be placed is large even for major institutions.
The same analyst cautioned that retail buyers can be less sensitive to price than institutions, calling the structure "a great deal for the company, but not necessarily for the people buying."
Anthropic's bankers are weighing plans to increase the company's valuation in its initial public offering to $1.5 trillion or more, the Financial Times reported, a sign of robust demand from investors.
Bankers indicated that they expect to raise the share price above the $70 to $78 range announced in a filing on Tuesday, the newspaper said.
The IPO was fully covered with orders from prospective investors for all the available shares when the deal launched, Bloomberg News has reported.
Anthropic is looking to sell 825 million shares, with the IPO slated to price Nov. 18.
Unlike SpaceX's IPO in June, which was designed to sell shares across multiple markets and to allocate a sizable block of stock to retail investors, Anthropic's lead underwriters are keeping final decisions close to their vests.
One of the three sources, who is a Canadian banker and worked on the SpaceX offering, described Elon Musk as "messianic" in his desire to build a following for the company by selling the IPO to as many shareholders as possible.
SpaceX raised a total of US$85.7-billion when it went public.
Ultimately, 10 percent of the IPO was allocated to global investors, and retail buyers were given 20 percent of the shares, according to one of the sources, who is familiar with the sales breakdown.
In Anthropic's case, Canadian banks are soliciting orders through their New York sales desks.
They then inform lead underwriter Goldman Sachs of the demand, and Goldman ultimately decides how shares are distributed.
There is also another key difference between the two IPOs: Anthropic loses substantially more money than SpaceX.
Anthropic's IPO prospectus shows the company's revenue has soared over the last three years, rising from US$41-million in 2023 to US$33-billion in the first nine months of 2026, but its losses have also jumped exponentially.
The company lost US$1.5-billion in 2023 and US$104-billion in the first nine months of 2026, though the majority of this loss is an accounting charge tied to money the company borrowed.
In SpaceX's case, the company lost US$4.9-billion in 2025 and made US$791-million in 2024, and there are also multiple revenue streams.
The company has an artificial intelligence division, which drives the bulk of its losses, but it also has a "connectivity" arm for low-earth-orbit satellites that made US$4.4-billion in income from operations in 2025.
Anthropic, meanwhile, is solely focused on AI and the company's "pay-for-intelligence" model is its main source of revenue.
That means Anthropic charges for access to its family of four Claude models, each with a different level of sophistication.
Final pricing, and how much of the retail tranche is taken up, will show how far individual investors' enthusiasm for AI extends to paying up at listing.
e2gold.ca reported in November that some young investors are turning to chatbots like ChatGPT to guide investment decisions.
This story was written by the e2gold.ca newsroom from reporting by The Globe and Mail, FactSet Insight, Bloomberg and investingLive. Quotes are checked word for word against that reporting.