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SpaceX’s SPCX recent IPO may have raised some investors’ hopes of using mutual and exchange-traded funds to capture any pop in Anthropic’s pending offering, but they’re unlikely to reap life-changing riches that way. First, most funds already mark their positions near the expected IPO value, limiting upside potential. Second, most funds’ stakes in the Claude chatbot creator are very small, meaning the portfolios’ other, larger holdings will water down any gains.
Finally, as SpaceX showed, early IPO pops can deflate quickly, and timing postoffering sales is not easy. Where Is Anthropic Valued Now? Funds’ per-share, split-adjusted Anthropic values ranged from Franklin Templeton’s $58.90, as of its Sept. 30, 2026, portfolios, to T.
Rowe Price’s $91.65, as of Oct. 30—a massive 55% difference. Timing could explain some of the gap; Franklin’s calculation appears to reflect Anthropic’s last May 2026 financing round price, without subsequent adjustments. It’s possible the firm has revised its numbers since the frontier artificial intelligence lab filed its S-1 IPO prospectus in October.
Still, timing does not account for all differences. Looking only at Sept. 30 portfolios, per-share values ranged from ClearBridge Select Fund’s LBFIX $58.90 (ClearBridge is a subsidiary of Franklin Templeton), seemingly reflecting Anthropic’s last financing round, to Tema Electrification ETF’s VOLT $85.10—a still-massive 44% difference. Given that Anthropic’s last financing round in May 2026 valued the company at $965 billion, that implies a $400 billion to $500 billion gap between ClearBridge’s estimated Anthropic value versus Tema’s and T.
Rowe’s marks, a gap roughly equivalent to the size of the 20th largest company in the S&P 500. Assuming those values have not converged, ClearBridge’s discounted Anthropic valuation relative to Tema or T. Rowe seems to offer an opportunity to realize more appreciation if the AI company’s shares jump after its IPO.
Given recent reporting that Anthropic is targeting a $1.5 trillion valuation, outside of the ClearBridge fund, much of the upside is already baked into mutual funds and ETFs’ net asset values, so there are no massive gains to be had for investors based purely on the expected IPO price. Why Private Company Valuations Can Vary Widely Why do these valuations vary so much? Mutual funds and ETFs have significant leeway in valuing private companies, since such holdings rarely have observable trading prices.
In practice, many asset managers anchor to the most recent financing round (Anthropic last raised money in May at a $965 billion valuation, or about $589 per share) and adjust based on market conditions or big secondary market trades. That still leaves a lot of room for disagreement among fund firms, especially when AI-related stocks post wide daily swings, as they have recently. As a result, valuation is often in the eye of the beholder.
Reported valuations can be stale, too. Mutual funds often disclose their portfolios 30 days after month- or quarter-end, so the Anthropic valuations we see could be different from what funds think it is worth in real time. Anthropic also disclosed in its S-1 that it did a 10-for-1 share split in September, so reported per-share valuations can also look 10 times higher than they truly are.
Anthropic Is Typically a Small Position In addition to the potential return difference that different valuations can cause, investors seeking pre-IPO exposure to Anthropic should note most funds and ETFs do not have large Anthropic positions. Only one has more than 5% of its portfolio in the company, and even at that level, the AI lab could double its value and the fund would see just a 5% gain, before factoring in how the other 95% of the portfolio performs. Of course, there is also no guarantee that Anthropic’s stock will rise post-IPO, and potential share price volatility can make timing an exit even harder, as SpaceX has shown.
Despite SpaceX’s massive rally in its first few days of trading (it nearly doubled by its third day of trading), it now trades near its IPO offer price. Thus, given funds’ and ETFs’ small helpings of Anthropic, the baked-in valuations, and the uncertainty over the direction, magnitude, and duration of its shares’ post-IPO performance, it’s not worth it for most investors to buy a mutual fund or ETF simply to get short-term exposure to Anthropic’s historic IPO. The author or authors do not own shares in any securities mentioned in this article.
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Source: Morningstar
