The Anthropic Stock Everyone Wants — and the $125 Billion Deal That Just Made It Bigger

Within Anthropic’s Fifth Street offices in San Francisco, a small team of engineers worked on what they kindly refer to as “integration planning” for the majority of Monday afternoon. While the other half of the building works on the next generation of Claude, that is corporate jargon for figuring out how to spend $100 billion of promised AWS capacity over the next ten years. The deal, which adds $25 billion to the current $8 billion stake and raises the total potential investment to $33 billion, was announced by Amazon late on Monday. Anthropic has promised to invest over $100 billion in Amazon Web Services in exchange. One of the most significant private valuations in American technology history is quietly occurring somewhere in the middle of that exchange.

As of right now, Anthropic is valued at about $380 billion. That surpasses the size of Coca-Cola. bigger than Disney. bigger than McDonald’s. However, it is absolutely impossible for almost all of the retail investors who are reading this to purchase a single share directly. No ticker is present. No S-1 registered with the SEC. A roadshow is not being marketed by an underwriter. Instead, there is an odd, disjointed private-market ecosystem where Hiive’s order book is closer to $732, Forge Global lists an indicative price of about $259 per share, and a patchwork of forward contracts and SPVs attempts to bridge the gap between a company’s growing importance and the genuinely awkward reality that most of us can’t own any of it.

This week, Anthropic was once again at the forefront of the conversation thanks to the Amazon deal. Once you unpack them, the mechanics are worthwhile. Anthropic is currently receiving a $5 billion check from Amazon, with an additional $20 billion subject to commercial milestones. In response, Anthropic is pledging to invest over $100 billion over a ten-year period in AWS infrastructure, which includes up to 5 gigawatts of compute power, tens of millions of Graviton CPUs, and next-generation Trainium chips. For scale, small national grids—not chatbots—are typically associated with electrical loads of five gigawatts. Before the year ends, the first gigawatt of Trainium2 and Trainium3 deployment is anticipated to go online. The agreement has been presented by Amazon CEO Andy Jassy as confirmation of AWS’s custom silicon strategy. Yes, it is. It’s also a huge wager that Anthropic’s computing needs will continue to double for at least ten years.

The valuation calculations are actually based on Anthropic’s financial trajectory. Disclosures made during the Series G-1 round revealed that the company’s annualized revenue run rate exceeded $30 billion in late 2025. That is remarkable for a company that was founded just five years ago by Dario and Daniela Amodei, as well as a number of other former OpenAI researchers who split over differences in AI safety strategies. Over 100,000 businesses have already implemented Claude, the company’s flagship AI system, through AWS Bedrock alone. These businesses include Pfizer, Lyft, and, as was widely reported this past quarter, a number of significant financial institutions testing Claude for research and compliance workflows.

This becomes extremely fascinating and dangerous in private-market trading. Secondary transactions take place via Forge, Hiive, EquityZen, and Nasdaq Private Market because Anthropic is not listed anywhere. Only accredited investors—those with $1 million in net worth, excluding primary residence, or $200,000 or more in annual income—are able to access those platforms. The disparity in prices between venues reveals the true inefficiency of this market. One valuation is implied by Forge’s Anthropic quote of $259. At $732, Hiive’s suggests something more like three times that amount. A public listing would typically smooth out different share classes, lockup terms, and rights of first refusal, but none of these are present. It serves as an example of why liquid markets are important.

Predictably, scams have followed. A group of funds has been promoting purported “access” to Anthropic over the past six months through indirect arrangements that frequently rely on forward contracts or SPVs with questionable legal standing. Although SEC investor alerts on pre-IPO AI company scams have highlighted the pattern, Anthropic has not released the same direct fraud warning as Anduril. The short answer is almost always no if someone emails you saying they can get you into “pre-IPO Anthropic shares,” and the slightly longer answer is that, even if they can, what you’re purchasing might be a synthetic exposure that won’t convert into actual shares at any listing event.

The cleanest proxy for retail investors seeking real exposure is still Amazon, which increased by about 2.7% in Monday’s after-hours trading to about $254.80 on the Anthropic news. Amazon has been specifically described by CNBC analysts as “a Mag 7 stock to ride the AI company’s success.” You also receive some exposure from Alphabet, which has a significant Anthropic stake from previous rounds. Beyond that, the deal’s surrounding silicon ecosystem—Astera Labs, Credo Technology, and Marvell—all advanced in terms of the implications for AWS infrastructure. Those are not anthropogenic. However, most investors can only get so close.

As this develops, there’s a feeling that Anthropic has subtly emerged as the most significant unlisted business of the AI era, and that its eventual public listing—whenever it occurs, though Dario Amodei hasn’t given a timeline—will be among the most significant initial public offerings (IPOs) in a generation. Until then, in a market that most investors are not permitted to see clearly, the valuation will continue to rise. As long as Google, Amazon, and a few sovereign wealth funds continue to write checks, the company might remain private until 2027 or later. We might also consider 2026—the year of the $380 billion phantom ticker—to be the turning point in American equity markets’ public-private divide.