Mutual Funds Quietly Stack Billions in Anthropic Shares
(Bloomberg) — Anthropic PBC’s march toward an initial public offering is expected to deliver billions of dollars in paper gains to an unlikely group of early investors: ordinary mutual funds.
Asset managers popular with retirement savers have quietly amassed sizable bets on the AI juggernaut. Funds scattered across investment houses including Fidelity Investments, Capital Group and BlackRock Inc. hold Anthropic shares worth more than $15 billion combined, according to data compiled by Bloomberg and company filings. The total sum is almost certainly larger, as the money managers oversee private funds that don’t disclose their holdings.
The stakes were built over time and for a fraction of their current value, setting up a huge payoff in the event of a successful IPO. Investors have told bankers that a valuation near $1.75 trillion is possible, though shifting AI sentiment has pushed that range as low as $1.4 trillion, Bloomberg News has reported. Anthropic most recently raised money privately at a valuation of $965 billion.
“You can count on one hand the companies over the last decade that compare to the excitement that we’ve seen with SpaceX and Anthropic,” said Dan Ives, partner at technology-focused merchant bank Yorkville Ives & Co. “There’s jitters in the market and Anthropic needs to execute but investors will give it the benefit of the doubt.”
Fidelity, Capital Group and BlackRock declined to comment on their Anthropic holdings.
Los Angeles-based Capital Group, the nearly century-old investment firm that manages the savings of millions of Americans, has stockpiled shares now worth at least $9 billion across several mutual funds. The firm’s $342 billion Growth Fund of the Americas and the $176 billion Fundamental Investors fund together own Anthropic shares worth north of $7 billion.
Fidelity, which has been putting slices of private companies in its funds for decades, has built a stake now worth at least $2 billion. The $174 billion Fidelity Contrafund, a fixture in retail and retirement portfolios, has a stake valued at the end of September at about $600 million — hundreds of millions more than the price it paid for the shares, according to company filings.
The firm’s Select Technology Portfolio, which manages about $37 billion, reported Anthropic shares worth about $1 billion at the end of September.
BlackRock has built positions worth no less than $500 million across some of its retail funds. Other asset managers including Franklin Templeton Inc. also have small stakes in the company.
Of course, a mega IPO isn’t guaranteed. Investors have become more cautious on AI as sky-high valuations and massive spending front-run proven profits. Early this month, the Claude developer reported quarterly revenue of nearly $17 billion — a twelvefold increase — but said it intends to spend more than $895 billion in coming years for computing-power costs and infrastructure.
