Want to Invest in Anthropic Before Its IPO? Here's How.

If you want to buy Anthropic stock before the company goes public, you can't type a ticker symbol into your brokerage app and hit the buy button. While Anthropic filed its confidential S-1 with the Securities and Exchange Commission back in June, shares will not be easily accessible to retail investors until it lists on a public exchange.

So for now, most of the ways that ordinary retail investors can get exposure to Anthropic will be indirect. The cleanest paths include public-company proxies or exchange-traded funds that already hold stakes in Anthropic, though there are secondary markets that most casual investors cannot use.

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What is the best way to invest in Anthropic?

Interest in the Anthropic IPO is not theoretical. A survey of investors by The Motley Fool found that 70% of respondents are considering buying either the OpenAI or the Anthropic IPO, or both. That level of early demand explains why some people are looking for backdoors now rather than waiting for the opening-day tape.

For most investors, the best way to gain exposure to Anthropic is to buy stock in publicly traded companies that already have equity stakes in it. Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) is the heavyweight in this category. It has already invested $13 billion in Anthropic and has committed up to $20 billion more contingent upon operational milestones.

Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOGL) (NASDAQ: GOOG) structured a similar ownership position through equity and contracts with Google Cloud. Both Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) and Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) invested in Anthropic's Series G funding round back in May. The developer of the Claude artificial intelligence chatbot runs certain workloads on Microsoft Azure and buys GPU clusters from Nvidia.

Outside of the cloud hyperscalers, Zoom and Salesforce also invested in Anthropic through their respective venture arms. These partnerships made strategic sense, as both companies could benefit from Anthropic's rapid valuation growth while integrating its tools into their respective workflows.

While none of these stocks offer anything close to pure-play exposure to Anthropic, they are the least expensive options for retail investors who want access before the IPO circus begins.

Exchange-traded funds with a direct line into Anthropic are rare. One of the more popular options is the KraneShares Artificial Intelligence and Technology Public and Private ETF (NASDAQ: AGIX). Its portfolio has stakes in about 72 companies, most of them publicly traded, but also a half dozen that are privately held, including Anthropic. Of note, the fund's expense ratio is a fairly high 1%.