Fidelity Marked Anthropic Up 32 Percent in August

BOSTON, Oct. 23 — Fidelity’sFidelity’s funds valued most of their Anthropic shares at $777.53 apiece on Aug. 31, up 32 percent from the $589.01 a share that other Fidelity funds used at July 31, the same as Fidelity’s cost for Series H shares bought on May 28. The Aug. 31 figures are in reports that three Fidelity trusts filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday, covering nine funds that hold the shares.The Nine FundsFidelity’s Puritan, Puritan K6, Balanced and Balanced K6 funds; the Technology, Communication Services and Software and IT Services portfolios of Fidelity Select Portfolios; and two Strategic Advisers international funds. Four of the nine also hold OpenAI. The July 31 figures come from the reports of five other Fidelity funds; the nine funds’ own July marks are not public, though in every Fidelity report this paper checked, funds carried a given series at the same figure. Each per-share figure here is this paper’s division of a reported value or cost by a number of shares.

The same reports carried OpenAI’s shares at $687.69, Fidelity’s cost for Series C shares bought on March 27. In the month-end reports this paper reviewed, Fidelity funds carried OpenAI at $693.90 at Feb. 28 and at $687.69 at every month-end from April 30 through Aug. 31.

The marks are one large investor’s estimates, set before this month’s slide in AI shares and before Anthropic’s planned listing and OpenAI’s reported new round could test them. The nine funds’ Anthropic shares cost $323.6 million and were carried at $1.73 billion at Aug. 31. Valued instead at the other funds’ July 31 marks, the same Aug. 31 holdings would have come to about $419 million less, by this paper’s arithmetic: a hypothetical, not a measured gain.

The Step

The nine funds held five Anthropic series. Their tables of restricted holdings give the date and cost of each purchase, which work out to $31.20 a share for Series B bought in March 2024, $30.00 for Series D-1 bought in May 2024, $140.97 for Series F bought in August 2025, $259.14 for Series G bought in January and $589.01 for Series H, bought on May 28 and, by both Strategic Advisers funds, on July 17. Anthropic named Fidelity Management & Research Company among the significant investors in its Series G and Series H rounds, announced on Feb. 12 and May 28.Level 3The reports sort holdings by how they are priced. Both labs’ shares are flagged as Level 3, valued on unobservable inputs, “including the Fund’s own assumptions based on the best information available.”

At Aug. 31, every series carried $777.53 except D-1, at $822.33. Both figures were 32.0 percent above the marks the other Fidelity funds used at July 31: $589.01 for most series and $622.94 for D-1.

In the month-end reports this paper reviewed since February, Fidelity funds’ marks mostly matched Fidelity’s latest acquisition cost. They carried most Anthropic series at the $259.14 Series G cost at Feb. 28 and March 31, and at the $589.01 Series H cost from May 31 through July 31. For most Anthropic series, the one earlier mark above cost in those reports came at April 30, when Fidelity funds carried them at $333.60, 28.7 percent above the Series G cost; Fidelity’s Series H purchase a month later cost $589.01 a share, about 77 percent above that mark.

Fidelity’s OpenAI shares, bought as Series A-2 in September 2024 at $187.86, Series A-3 in August 2025 at about $307 and Series C on March 27 at $687.69, all carried $687.69 at Aug. 31. OpenAI was raising up to $30 billion at $1.25 trillion before the new money, CNBC reported on Oct. 22, citing people familiar with the talks. TechCrunch, relaying the report, wrote that terms were still being negotiated and that OpenAI declined to comment; it noted that OpenAI’s March round had valued it at $852 billion after the money, and that Bloomberg had reported a figure of $1.4 trillion a month earlier.

The Method

The reports do not say why the Anthropic mark moved, or why OpenAI’s did not. They say that when market prices are not readily available or reliable, holdings are fair valued “in good faith” by a Fair Value Committee set up by Fidelity’s investment adviser. Private shares without observable inputs are valued by approaches including a market approach, which “considers factors including the price of recent investments in the same or a similar security or financial metrics of comparable securities.”

Two funds show more, though only by class of security. In the Puritan Fund, whose Anthropic shares were carried at $166.7 million, the report lists two techniques for all $255.4 million of the convertible preferred stock it valued on unobservable inputs: multiples of enterprise value to revenue, from 0.7 to 21.5 times, and an options-pricing model. The Communication Services Portfolio, which holds both labs, lists the same two, with multiples from 9.6 to 30.1; neither table lists a transaction price, and the Technology Portfolio’s table does. The tables combine many companies’ securities and assign no technique, multiple or input to either lab, so they do not show how either mark was reached.

The reports are plain that such figures are estimates. “Actual results could differ from those estimates,” they say of the funds’ accounts, and significant changes in the inputs could have produced “a significantly higher or lower fair value measurement.”Audited or NotThe Puritan Trust report is an annual one, audited by PricewaterhouseCoopers, whose procedures included confirming holdings with “issuers of privately offered securities.” The Select Portfolios and Strategic Advisers reports are semiannual and unaudited. Nor can the shares be sold freely. “Disposal of these securities may involve time-consuming negotiations and expense, and prompt sale at an acceptable price may be difficult,” the reports say of restricted holdings.

Disposal of these securities may involve time-consuming negotiations and expense, and prompt sale at an acceptable price may be difficult.

A per-share mark alone does not establish a company valuation: that also requires the relevant share count and the securities’ rights.Shares, Not CompaniesFidelity’s acquisition cost per share for Series H was 2.3 times its cost for Series G, by this paper’s division, while Anthropic’s announced valuation after the money rose 2.5 times, from $380 billion at its Series G round in February to $965 billion at its Series H round in May.

The Tests

The marks also predate October. On Oct. 15 Reuters reported, citing three people, that some investors at Anthropic’s investor day had discussed a valuation of around $1.5 trillion for its offering, “a significant step down from the roughly $2 trillion valuation that investors had previously expected.” Anthropic did not immediately respond to requests for comment, Reuters said. On Oct. 22 the Nasdaq Composite had its biggest decline in four months, Reuters reported.

IFR reported this month, citing one person familiar with the process, that Anthropic planned to file publicly with the S.E.C. on Monday, Oct. 26, start its roadshow on Nov. 9 and price the offering the following week. The S.E.C. reviews draft registration statements privately only if a company files publicly “at least 15 days prior to any road show”; Nov. 9 is 14 days after Oct. 26. No public filing from Anthropic was on EDGAR early Sunday. A public prospectus would show how many shares Anthropic has, which Fidelity’s reports do not.

Amazon, which holds Anthropic preferred stock, adjusts that stake for “observable price changes or impairments,” and it reports its third quarter on Thursday. In the second quarter it recorded upward adjustments of about $50.5 billion “to reflect observable changes in price related to Anthropic’s fundings,” its quarterly report says.AMZNNasdaq240.35▼3.44−1.4%Amazon · Friday’s session Its next report may show whether it saw such a change in the quarter that included August.

Fidelity’s next marks could come in reports for Sept. 30, the year-end of a trust whose funds held Anthropic in March. This year the Fidelity reports checked here reached EDGAR seven to eight weeks after their periods closed, which points to late November.

Daily Cortex is written with AI models, including Anthropic’s Claude, and fact-checked with OpenAI’s GPT models.