Anthropic IPO Timing: What Employees Can Do While the Date Is Still Unknown
If you work at Anthropic, you’ve probably refreshed the news more than once this month looking for a date. We’ve been doing the same.
We’re still getting calls from Anthropic employees asking the same thing: should I be doing something right now, or do I just wait?
Our answer is somewhere in the middle. You want to do what you can, but you don’t want to do too much. Overplaying your hand before there’s a date can cost you, and so can sitting still until the S-1 goes public.
This post covers what’s going on in the IPO market right now and how we’re thinking about it with clients who hold Anthropic equity.
Why Did IPOs Stall Again This Fall?
A few months ago it looked like the IPO window was wide open. Then several big names backed off at once.
The clearest example is Oura, the smart ring maker. It had launched its Nasdaq offering and was close to pricing when it postponed the IPO on September 29, citing “uncertainty” in the market. Oura said demand was strong and still walked away, and a couple of other issuers postponed or withdrew their own deals within days.
OpenAI has gone quiet on its listing too. It hasn’t officially said it’s pausing, but reports in late September say it’s looking to raise at least $30 billion in a new private round while its IPO gets pushed back. A year ago a lot of people framed OpenAI and Anthropic as racing each other to go public. Right now only one of them looks like it’s still running.
We wrote earlier this year about whether 2026 would be the year for tech IPOs. The honest update is that it still could be, but the market has gotten pickier about timing, which brings us to the one company that still seems to be moving.
Anthropic Is the One Still Moving Forward
Anthropic confidentially submitted a draft S-1 to the SEC back in June, and as far as anyone outside the company can tell, it hasn’t slowed down since. That’s what makes this stretch so frustrating for employees. Everything points to an IPO, and nobody knows exactly when.
A confidential filing lets a company work through SEC review without making its financials public. The public S-1 usually shows up a few weeks before the roadshow, so that’s the first hard signal most employees will get. Until then, everything you read is reporting from people familiar with the plans.
If you’ve been at Anthropic for a while, you may remember the discussion about making 10b5-1 trading plans mandatory for employees. That’s still worth reading, because it shapes how and when you’ll actually be able to sell once the stock trades.
When Is the Anthropic IPO Expected?
There’s no official date. Earlier reporting pointed to October, and more recent reporting points later. Bloomberg reported in early October that Anthropic is aiming to go public as soon as mid-November, with marketing to investors possibly starting the week of November 9.
That’s the latest we’ve seen, and it could move again. Oura’s plans changed within days of launching its deal. A November listing still puts a lot of decisions into this tax year, though, which is why we don’t think waiting it out is the right default for most people.
Landon covered how IPO waves come and go in our video Are IPOs Back?, and the pattern hasn’t changed much. The market goes quiet, everyone decides IPOs are over, and then a big one prices and the window opens again.
Doing Nothing While You Wait Has a Cost Too
The temptation right now is to put everything on hold until there’s a date, and we understand why. You don’t want to make a big move based on a headline that turns out to be wrong.
The problem is that some of the most useful planning has to happen before the IPO.
Once the company is public, your options get valued at a real share price, your trading windows get set by the company’s insider trading policy, and a lockup usually keeps you from selling for a while. Choices that are flexible today get a lot narrower after that.
On the other side, going all in before there’s a date carries its own risk. If you exercise everything now and the IPO slips into next year, you could be sitting on a large tax bill for shares you can’t sell yet.
That’s the balance we’re trying to strike with clients right now: take a few steps that make sense in almost any timeline and hold off on the ones that only make sense if the IPO happens on schedule. For ISO holders, that starts with the exercise question.
Exercising Some of Your Options This Year Can Make Sense
For employees holding incentive stock options, the exercise question comes up on almost every call. We’ve been getting a lot of questions about early exercise in particular.
Exercising ISOs before the IPO starts the holding period clock. To get the better tax treatment on a sale, ISO shares generally need to be held more than two years from the grant date and more than one year from exercise. If you miss those holding periods, the IRS treats the income from the sale as ordinary income.
Exercising some shares now means more of your stock could qualify sooner after the company goes public.
The tradeoff is AMT. The IRS says you “may be subject to alternative minimum tax in the year you exercise an ISO,” and the amount that counts toward AMT is the gap between the fair market value and your strike price. When a company’s private valuation has climbed fast, that gap can be big even if your strike price is tiny.
Say you hold 20,000 ISOs with a $4 strike, and the current fair market value is $80 a share. Under IRS Publication 525, the gap on every share you exercise counts toward AMT, and you can’t sell any shares yet to pay that bill. Exercising a quarter of them keeps the AMT piece much smaller, which may fit inside your AMT room or leave a bill you can comfortably cover.
We recommend running your own numbers through our AMT calculator before you commit to anything. These numbers are only an illustration, and your grant terms and tax picture will change the answer.
Once you’ve run the numbers, the next question is how much to exercise while the date is still open.
How Much Should You Exercise Before There’s a Date?
We’d usually exercise less than we would if the IPO date were already set, and that’s how we’re approaching it with clients right now.
If we knew the stock would start trading next month and when your lockup would end, we’d plan a bigger exercise this year, because you’d have a clear path to selling shares to cover the tax.
Without that clarity, we’d rather see clients exercise a portion this year, keep enough cash on hand to pay any AMT out of pocket, and leave room to do more once the timing is real. If the IPO lands in November, you still have time before year-end to adjust. If it slips, you haven’t overcommitted.
January matters here as well. We’ve written about why January can be a good month to exercise ISOs, since it gives you the most time to see how the year plays out before the tax bill is due. For some people the right plan is a smaller exercise this fall and another one early next year.
Our ISO exercise strategy post goes deeper on how we stage exercises across tax years.
Get the Rest of Your Plan Ready Before the S-1 Goes Public
Exercising is one piece. A few other things are worth doing now, while you have time and the date is still open.
Pull together your grant documents, your exercise history and your cost basis records so you aren’t hunting for them during the lockup. Figure out how much of your net worth you’re comfortable leaving in a single stock, before the share price makes that decision feel emotional. Think about what you’d actually use the money for, whether that’s a house, paying off debt or just a cushion. And if you’re anywhere near Section 16 territory, talk to legal early about trading windows.
When the IPO date does land, we’ll update our lockup expiration planning guide with what we’re seeing. In the meantime, the people who come out of an IPO in the best shape are usually the ones who did a moderate amount of work early rather than everything at once or nothing at all.
If you liked this article, you’ll probably also like If You Work at OpenAI or Anthropic, Here’s What to Think About Before IPO.
If you hold Anthropic equity and want help deciding how much to exercise this year, reach out to us.
We’ll look at your grants, your AMT exposure and your cash together, and build an equity compensation plan that works whether the IPO lands in November or later.
Until next time.
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