How to buy Anthropic shares with a bonus: IPO and listing date

A ticker is the short code you’ll find the share under at your broker. New eToro clients get a bonus in free shares worth £40 to £500 for their first deposit, though ANT isn’t one of them. That’s because the company behind the Claude AI model isn’t listed yet: the US financial press expects the first trades in the week of 16 November 2026, and neither an official date nor a price has been set. Until then, all you can get is a CFD, a contract with the broker on the difference in price, not a share.

One less welcome point up front. Under the current plan, retail investors in the UK can’t take part in the IPO itself.

The Anthropic IPO in brief

An IPO (initial public offering) is the point at which a private company first sells its shares to the public and starts trading on a stock exchange. Anthropic was founded in 2021 by Dario and Daniela Amodei together with five other co-founders, and today it’s best known for its Claude models.

Rows marked unofficial are based on US media reports. In the amended prospectus of 2 November 2026, the boxes for the price and the number of shares are still blank.

How to buy Anthropic shares step by step

The process is much the same at both brokers and differs from buying any other US share only in that the price tends to be jumpier in the first few days.

1. An account with the broker: you open it online, and part of the process is an ID check. You can open one now, before trading starts.
2. A deposit, most cheaply by bank transfer. At eToro, the size of your first deposit also decides your share bonus.
3. Searching for the ticker ANT. At eToro, watch out for a mix-up: ANT.24-7 is a CFD, not the share.
4. Choosing an amount or a number of shares. Thanks to fractional shares you don’t need to buy a whole one, and we cover the tax side further down.
5. Order type and confirming the purchase.

The last two steps decide what you end up paying. A market order fills at whatever the price is at that moment. A limit order fills only at your price or better, so it may not fill at all.

A long-term investor misses nothing by simply watching the first few days of trading.

Where to buy Anthropic shares: three routes

An investor in the UK has three situations to choose from, which differ in what you actually own and when you can get it. One of them is effectively closed to you.

Before the listing: CFDs at eToro and XTB

Today there’s only the CFD, a contract with the broker on the difference in price. One is offered by eToro under the name ANT.24-7. 55% of retail investor accounts lose money when trading CFDs with this provider. The other option is XTB with a CFD on Anthropic before the IPO. 79% of retail investor accounts lose money when trading CFDs with this provider. Neither gets you a share, and we go through the details below.

At the IPO price: not from the UK for now

The IPO price is the price at which the company sells its shares just before trading starts. In the US, retail investors can get them through Charles Schwab, Fidelity, Robinhood, Trade-PMR, SoFi and E*TRADE.

The European part of the offering is narrower. It covers Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain and Sweden, with Switzerland handled separately.

The UK isn’t there.

In the rest of the European Economic Area (EU, Norway, Iceland, Liechtenstein), the offer is aimed at qualified investors, mainly institutions, or has to fit exemptions that don’t require an approved prospectus. As a non-EEA country, the UK falls outside even that.

We can’t let this pass without saying that this is what changes the whole decision for a UK investor. eToro does appear among the distributors for Europe, alongside Trade Republic, Revolut and Interactive Brokers, but that alone doesn’t give a UK client access. XTB isn’t on the list. The list of countries and distributors could still change.

After trading starts: the real share at eToro and XTB

This is where the route opens up. Once ANT starts trading on the Nasdaq, you’ll be able to buy it at both brokers as a real share, just like Apple or Nvidia. We couldn’t find out the exact time it’ll be added in advance, as the brokers haven’t published it yet.

There’s also an indirect route through companies that hold a stake in Anthropic. Amazon and Google will each own more than 5% of its shares after the IPO, but buying their shares mainly buys you their own businesses, with Anthropic making up only part of the value. We cover other options in our article on how to start investing in artificial intelligence.

Anthropic CFDs before the IPO: what you’re actually buying

At XTB the instrument is called Anthropic 24/7, ticker ANTH.24H7. It trades almost round the clock, from Saturday 4:00 to Friday 23:00 Central European Time under the current trading schedule. XTB describes it as a speculation on the expected valuation of the company rising or falling, with no share ownership.

Both offers share the same weak spot. On the public pages for these instruments we found no fees, no leverage and no exact procedure for the day the company actually lists, and that disappointed us. Other brokers handle it differently: some settle the position at the end of the first trading day at the company’s actual market value, others turn it into an ordinary share CFD. It’s never converted into real shares.

Different terms may also apply if the IPO is postponed or cancelled.

And it’s leverage that makes a CFD far riskier than an ordinary share. For CFDs on individual shares, FCA rules cap leverage for retail clients at 1:5, so check the exact figure for the Anthropic CFD in the instrument’s specification.

An example at 1:5 leverage: you deposit £1,000 and open a position worth £5,000. If the price falls 20%, the loss is £1,000 and your whole deposit is gone. Without leverage, the same fall would have cost you £200.

At eToro the instrument is called Anthropic 24/7 CFD, ticker ANT.24-7. It also trades practically without a break, weekends included.

The screenshot shows a price of $115.56. That isn’t the price of ANT shares, because no such price exists yet.

How exactly eToro arrives at it, we couldn’t work out from its page for the instrument.

The table sums up the differences between the two routes. For a broader comparison, see our article on CFD shares vs real shares.

As a route into a long-term investment, the pre-IPO CFD didn’t convince us. It makes more sense for an experienced trader who wants a short-term bet on whether the market will value the company above or below today’s expectations, and who can put a number on the possible loss.

We’d also be wary of “pre-IPO shares” offered on unfamiliar platforms. Anthropic says it hasn’t authorised anyone other than the named firms to sell in its international offerings.

Real Anthropic shares: eToro or XTB?

For a long-term purchase the picture is much brighter. Both brokers are authorised by the FCA, both offer US shares and fractional shares, and the differences lie mostly in fees and the services around them, which is good news for a beginner.

ANT will trade in dollars, so with a sterling account you pay the conversion when you buy and again when you sell: 0.75% at eToro and 0.5% at XTB. On a purchase and later sale of $1,000 of shares, eToro charges UK clients no commission at all, and XTB doesn’t either. Here, the conversion fee is the cost that matters. What XTB charges UK clients for card deposits we couldn’t confirm from its published fees.

eToro is where we’d look first. It has CopyTrader, which lets you copy the trades of other investors, a larger community and the share bonus for new clients. XTB is a good second choice, especially if the lower conversion fee matters most to you. For a detailed comparison of the platforms, spreads and support, see our XTB vs eToro comparison.

eToro is also running the £40 to £500 bonus in shares for a first deposit: £40 from a £500 deposit, £100 from £1,000, £300 from £5,000 and £500 from £10,000. You choose from NVIDIA, Apple, Rolls-Royce Holdings, AMD, ASML Holding and BAE Systems, so Anthropic isn’t among them.

What to expect on day one: the SpaceX experience

The closest comparison comes from June 2026. SpaceX (ticker SPCX) raised $86 billion on the Nasdaq at an IPO price of $135, and XTB offered its real shares once trading began.

But ordinary investors didn’t buy at $135. The first trade went through on 12 June 2026 only at about 16:46 UK time, at $150, more than two hours after the US market opened, and the day closed at $161, 19% above the IPO price. With an IPO, the Nasdaq first shows only an indicative price for a while, then opens the share at a single common price that can be a long way from the IPO price.

One case doesn’t make a rule.

A short detour on scale: if Anthropic really raised $100 billion or more, it would beat the record set by SpaceX, which only a few months earlier had nearly tripled the previous high set by Saudi Aramco in 2019.

But back to the point. The practical upshot is simple: a market order placed before the open can fill at a price you weren’t expecting at all.

What the prospectus reveals: revenue, losses and commitments

Revenue growth is the most striking part of the prospectus. In the third quarter of 2026 the company reported revenue of $17.0 billion, up 1,127% year on year, while the cost of computing power and infrastructure rose 382%.

A net loss of $104 billion sounds alarming, but most of it isn’t money spent. In the first half of 2026 alone, $72.4 billion of the $80.7 billion loss came from the accounting revaluation of convertible bonds and similar instruments, which rose along with the company’s own valuation. None of it left the till.

The operating result tells you more. The second quarter showed a profit of $974 million and the third a loss of $567 million, mainly because of $5.0 billion spent on computing power bought in a hurry and at higher prices, and $2.0 billion of non-cash costs tied to a programme that matches employees’ donations.

At 30 September 2026 the company had $131.8 billion in cash and short-term investments. I have to admit another figure struck us more: commitments to buy computing power and pay leases totalling $895.4 billion, of which $69.8 billion falls due within the next 12 months. The rest stretches out to 2045.

Risks we wouldn’t underestimate

Strong revenue doesn’t make a cheap share. This is where we think the whole IPO story is at its weakest, because the offer price is set to reflect very high expectations of further growth.

Price against revenue

Over the last four quarters Anthropic had revenue of around $35.3 billion. At a valuation of $1.5 to $2 trillion, buyers would be paying $43 to $57 for every dollar of annual revenue. Of 4,110 IPOs between 1980 and 2024, only 14 went above $40, and over the following three years at most they trailed the wider market by an average of 15.4%.

We take it more as a warning about the price than about the company. Fourteen cases isn’t many, and Anthropic is growing differently from most of them, but at that kind of price history simply isn’t on the buyer’s side. Institutional investors are also reported to be pushing towards the bottom of the range.

Who runs the company

A Class A share gets you one vote, but you’ll have very little say. The seven co-founders hold a special share carrying 50.1% of the votes through their own company, and the independent Long-Term Benefit Trust elects most of the board. Anthropic is also a public benefit corporation, so it has to weigh shareholders’ interests against other goals.

For an ordinary investor that means one thing: in a vote against management, you won’t move anything.

Other risks in brief

• Lock-up expiry: existing shareholders can’t sell for a set period. For most it’s up to 180 days, for founders and large holders up to 365 days, the period can end early and the banks can grant exceptions.
• The five biggest customers account for roughly 25% of revenue, none of them more than 10%.
• Dividends aren’t expected any time soon.
• Competition from OpenAI and Google, which spend huge sums on the same kind of models and could push prices down.
• The heavy commitments to computing power stay in place even if demand grows more slowly.

Which route suits whom

For short-term speculation before the IPO there’s the CFD, with high risk and terms you’ll have to dig out yourself.

For holding over years, the real share after trading starts makes more sense.

If you want in at the IPO price, you won’t get there from the UK for now. What we get out of it is that the IPO itself is no reason to rush: you’ll be able to buy the same share in a month or a year, perhaps at a different price, and that cuts both ways.

Tax on Anthropic shares and CFDs

In the UK there’s no holding period after which gains on shares become tax-free. Gains above the annual exempt amount, currently £3,000, are subject to Capital Gains Tax however long you held the shares, and that includes fractional shares.

Shares held in a Stocks and Shares ISA are the exception, as gains there are free of Capital Gains Tax. Whether ANT will be available inside a particular broker’s ISA we couldn’t confirm before trading starts.

CFDs can’t be held in an ISA, and gains on them are normally subject to Capital Gains Tax too.

Dividends aren’t something to think about yet, since the company doesn’t pay any.

Anthropic IPO: frequently asked questions

Can I buy Anthropic shares now?

No. The shares aren’t traded on any exchange yet, and the only thing available is the pre-IPO CFD, which isn’t a share.

When will Anthropic shares start trading?

The US press expects the first trades in the week of 16 November 2026, but there’s no official date yet.

Can you buy Claude shares?

Claude is a product, not a separate company. The shares are issued by its maker, Anthropic, so at your broker you’ll be looking for the ticker ANT, and only once trading on the Nasdaq has begun.

What ticker will the shares have?

ANT on the Nasdaq Global Select Market.

Can I take part in the IPO from the UK?

On current documents, probably not. The retail offer in Europe is aimed at Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain and Sweden, with Switzerland handled separately. The UK isn’t on the list. Other EEA countries only get the offer in a restricted form, mainly for qualified investors, and the UK sits outside the EEA altogether. The list could still change, and the final European prospectus will settle it. The real share should be available as normal through eToro or XTB once trading starts.

How much will one Anthropic share cost?

Nobody knows yet, as the prospectus gives neither the price nor the number of shares. The $115.56 shown at eToro belongs to the CFD, not to ANT shares.

Can I get a bonus on Anthropic shares?

At eToro, yes, with one catch. New clients get shares worth £40 to £500 for their first deposit, but they choose from NVIDIA, Apple, Rolls-Royce Holdings, AMD, ASML Holding and BAE Systems. ANT itself you then buy with your own money.

What happens to the CFD after the listing?

That depends on each broker’s terms, and we couldn’t find them published at either XTB or eToro. The CFD isn’t converted into a real share.

Will Anthropic pay dividends?

No, it has no plans to for the foreseeable future.

Is eToro or XTB better for Anthropic shares?

Our first choice is eToro, for CopyTrader, zero commission for UK clients and the share bonus. XTB suits investors who mainly want the lower 0.5% conversion fee. The details are in our comparison of the two brokers.

Will other brokers offer ANT?

Probably. Nasdaq shares are usually available at other brokers with access to the US market, such as Trading 212, Freetrade or Hargreaves Lansdown. Check with them directly whether they’ll list ANT, and compare commission and currency conversion while you’re at it.