Freshfields Lands Underwriter Role in Anthropic's $1.5 Trillion Nasdaq IPO as Wilson Sonsini, Cravath, Orrick and Cleary Gottlieb Also Advise
Freshfields has secured a key role advising the underwriters in Anthropic's anticipated Nasdaq IPO, with valuation estimates ranging from $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion. The work is led out of Freshfields' Silicon Valley office, continuing the firm's push into the US market following its role on the European side of SpaceX's $1.75 trillion-plus stock market debut earlier this year. Wilson Sonsini is advising Anthropic directly, while Cravath acts for the company's co-founders. Orrick and Cleary Gottlieb are handling matters spanning executive compensation and corporate governance. Anthropic has filed paperwork with US regulators ahead of the listing. The mandate extends an existing relationship: Freshfields and Anthropic struck a multi-year partnership earlier in 2026 to develop legal AI tools, deploying Claude across all 33 of the firm's offices for tasks including contract review and document drafting. The IPO would, if completed at the upper end of estimates, rank among the largest technology listings on record.
Why this matters
An Anthropic IPO at a $1.5-2 trillion valuation would be one of the defining capital markets events of the decade and a landmark moment for the AI sector's maturation into public markets. The deal tests whether investor appetite for AI companies, already strained by elevated rates and macro uncertainty flagged in this briefing's Budget coverage, can absorb a listing at the very top of the valuation range. For law firms, it signals that AI companies are becoming transformative clients in their own right, not merely tools: Freshfields' dual role as Anthropic's AI development partner and its IPO counsel sets a template for deep, multi-workstream firm-client relationships in the sector. The breadth of the legal line-up, five named firms across issuer, founders, underwriters and governance, reflects the regulatory and structural complexity of listing a frontier AI company.
On the Ground
The transaction activates capital markets, corporate governance, executive compensation, and technology practice groups simultaneously. Underwriter counsel work (Freshfields) centres on prospectus due diligence, comfort letters, and underwriting agreement negotiation; issuer counsel (Wilson Sonsini) drives the S-1 drafting and SEC response process. A trainee on this deal would expect to run disclosure checklists, coordinate document management across a multi-firm working group, and assist on the verification exercise for the prospectus. Ongoing Anthropic AI tool development work creates additional TMT and commercial contracts demand for firms embedded with AI clients at this level.
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