Investment banks are shutting out investors from mainland China and Hong Kong from Anthropic's public offering, according to Bloomberg. Multiple underwriters have rejected buy orders from these jurisdictions or consider allocations unlikely. Some of the people involved cited ITAR—the US export control regulations governing defense-related goods—as the legal reason for the exclusion, while Anthropic declined to comment.
Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are leading the offering alongside 20 other participating banks. Anthropic stock is scheduled to price on November 18 and trade on Nasdaq under the ticker ANT. The application of defense export controls to an AI public offering demonstrates how regulatory friction directly restricts liquidity pools for US frontier developers.
The capital restrictions mirror Anthropic's operational posture in the region, where its products are not officially available. The company has blocked entities under Chinese control from its AI services and continues to combat workarounds that grant Chinese firms access to Claude Code. Anthropic previously exposed large-scale distillation operations conducted by DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax, which involved roughly 16 million queries.