Anthropic lines up UK retail offer as AI stocks wobble

UK retail investors are set to be offered the chance to buy shares in Anthropic’s hotly awaited IPO after tech stocks were sent reeling by the US midterm elections.

Fintech platform RetailBook has been appointed to co-ordinate an “expected” UK retail offer for the Claude creator, according to a notice on the chatbot’s website, amid a rocky week on Wall Street. The Democratic Party’s victory in taking control of both the House and the Senate caused AI-related stocks to plunge on Thursday before partially recovering on Friday.

Investment sites Hargreaves Lansdown, AJ Bell, eToro, Interactive Brokers, Interactive Investor and Revolut are lined up to take orders from their clients.

The move comes five months after more than 100,000 individual UK investors applied for almost $1bn of stock in SpaceX’s record-breaking initial public offering, in the first use of a new public offer platform introduced by the Financial Conduct Authority in January. Some received as much as $135,000 of stock in what was the largest IPO in history.

Those investors benefited from a first-day “pop” in the share price of 19.2 per cent, although anyone who has held on to the stock has seen this gain evaporate, with SpaceX currently trading at $131 a share, below the $135 IPO price, as the stock was swept up in this week’s tech sell-off.

Despite its disappointing post-IPO performance, SpaceX remains in demand. It was the only non-UK company among the 10 most popular shares bought on wealth manager Evelyn Partners’ direct-to-consumer Bestinvest platform in October.

Anthropic’s impending float may be even bigger than SpaceX’s, with talk of it raising as much as $100bn, compared with SpaceX’s $86bn, although it may have a lower valuation, at $1.5tn-$1.6tn, versus $1.77tn.

Jason Hollands, managing director of Evelyn Partners, said he believed the slide in SpaceX’s share price and that of the broader AI sector may weigh on demand for Anthropic.

“There will be some investors that feel a little bit bruised by the SpaceX experience so far and in the wider market it has been a difficult month for AI stocks,” he said.

“When SpaceX came out there was a lot of excitement about it, but there is a bit more scepticism creeping in towards AI stocks. My gut feeling is that people will be a little bit more circumspect about it.

“Anthropic is a very risky stock,” he added. “At the time of its IPO, SpaceX was on an enormous valuation without the revenues to back it up and I think we would say that 10 times over with Anthropic.”

Ben Derber, equity research analyst at wealth manager Rathbones, said he believed the fallout from the Democratic Party’s victory in the midterm elections this week could also weigh on demand for Anthropic stock, with shares of chipmakers and data centre operators falling.

“We see how the semiconductor sector has reacted to the Democratic sweep. The general view is that it will moderate the pace at which data centres are built out in some states in the US,” said Derber.

UK investors with a high appetite for risk may also get the chance to make a leveraged bet on Anthropic from its first day of trading.

Leveraged Shares plans to list a 3x Long Anthropic exchange-traded product (ETP) on the London Stock Exchange ahead of the IPO, with the vehicle holding cash until Anthropic actually floats.

The hope is that this will allow it to buy Anthropic stock soon after the opening auction. This approach is designed to avoid a repeat of the SpaceX float, when leveraged ETPs that began trading on IPO day could not gain exposure to SpaceX shares until the following trading day due to the time difference with the US.

RetailBook and several of the investment platforms declined to comment.