Anthropic's massive IPO is coming. But its impact on S.F. may already be here

Anthropic's initial public offering, or IPO, could be the biggest in history, with a value of up to $2 trillion. But experts say much of the company's effect on San Francisco's economy has already happened before the IPO. The city is unlikely to gain much direct financial benefit when the company sells its shares to the public.

Here are five reasons why the huge stock market launch could create great wealth for a small group of people without having as large an effect on the local economy.

No local tax revenue

Like all cities in California, San Francisco cannot charge an income tax. That means it will not receive direct tax revenue from Anthropic's huge IPO. The city has collected more business and property taxes as Anthropic and its rival OpenAI have grown and rented more office space. Some business taxes are also linked to pay that workers receive in company stock. But San Francisco will miss most of the tax windfall from the IPO as it continues to face yearly budget shortfalls.

California, however, could collect billions of dollars or more in taxes when Anthropic employees and investors sell their shares. State officials have not yet estimated the amount. Over the past year, the state's Legislative Analyst's Office has warned that the stock market may be overheated and that an AI bubble could form. It also noted that the state's finances have long been unstable and heavily dependent on wealthy people. In May, the office said, "It is now hard to ignore that the stock market appears, on its face, to be in a speculative bubble, rivaled only by the dot-com boom and the Roaring Twenties."

Anthropic's hiring boom doesn't offset mass tech layoffs

Anthropic has been hiring rapidly. Its workforce roughly doubled this year, growing from 2,500 to 5,300 employees. On Monday, it had 681 job openings, including 463 that could be based in San Francisco. Many job listings name more than one possible location. The company has previously said that about half its workers are in the Bay Area.

But Anthropic's growth, along with hiring at other AI research companies, is much smaller than the widespread job losses in the tech industry over the past few years. In San Francisco and San Mateo counties, the information sector, which includes many tech companies, lost 2,400 jobs between September 2025 and September 2026, according to state data. The number of jobs in this sector is now about 25,000 below its 2022 peak. Professional and business services also lost 1,500 jobs over the past 12 months.

Tech layoffs are continuing. eBay cut 1,100 jobs last week, and Microsoft reportedly offered buyouts to 60,000 workers on Monday. Anthropic is also competing with other companies for a limited number of skilled workers, which could slow its future growth. In its IPO filing, the company said competition to hire AI experts is "exceptionally intense," especially in the Bay Area. It also expects to continue facing "difficulty in hiring and retaining highly skilled employees with appropriate qualifications at the pace that our operations require."

Lock-up restrictions mean the timing of wealth boom is uncertain

Like other tech companies that have gone public, Anthropic is placing limits on when shareholders can sell their shares. These limits are called lock-ups. They do not all follow the usual 180-day waiting period, making it harder to know when employees will be able to sell their shares and how many they will sell. Some shareholders can sell up to 10% of their shares on the first day of trading.

But the company's biggest shareholders must wait longer, according to its IPO filing. Anthropic's seven co-founders, including Dario and Daniella Amodei, can sell only 29% of their shares after 180 days or two full trading days after the company reports its earnings for the first quarter of 2027. They must wait until a full year after the IPO prospectus or two full trading days after the company reports its earnings for the third quarter of 2027 to sell their remaining shares.

If Anthropic reaches a value of $2 trillion, each of the seven co-founders could be worth about $28 billion. But they have also previously promised to give away 80% of their wealth to charity.

No matter how many Anthropic employees sell shares, fewer people are likely to benefit than from some of the biggest IPOs of the past. When Uber went public in 2019 at a value of about $82 billion, it had more than 22,000 employees, not counting drivers. That was roughly four times Anthropic's workforce.

"Yes, a trillion dollars is a lot of money," Ted Egan, San Francisco's chief economist, said in July. "It's liable to be a relatively few number of people - less than a couple thousand - with a lot of money."

IPO may widen S.F.'s housing divide

Anthropic's IPO filing comes as San Francisco's expensive housing market has already been very active for much of the past year.

This week, a mansion in the Presidio area sold for $28.5 million, which was $10 million more than the asking price. It sold after just 20 days on the market, setting a new record. In May, a home in Cow Hollow sold for nearly $8 million above its asking price. Such bidding wars are no longer unusual. Last month, nearly 92% of the city's single-family homes sold for more than their asking prices. This rush to buy homes was already clear a year ago, especially at the high end of the market. Multi-million-dollar homes in the city's most desirable areas that had once struggled to find buyers began selling much faster.

Expensive home sales also bring money to the city. San Francisco charges a 6% tax when properties sell for more than $25 million. Voters approved that rate in 2020, and it remains in place after city leaders put a plan to cut it in half on hold earlier this year. Another measure on the November ballot would keep the current rates and direct half the money from qualifying sales toward affordable housing.

An IPO could make competition for homes even stronger if employees and investors gain access to more of their wealth. But the bidding wars were already happening, driven by higher salaries in the AI industry, wealth from company shares and a shortage of homes for sale.

"The wealth is already here," said Peter Rodway, a senior partner at Neal Ward Properties. He said the biggest effect of the AI boom on San Francisco's housing market has been a "generational shift in the buyer pool."

"We're seeing younger and younger people affording houses that take oftentimes lifetimes to develop equity for," Rodway said. "It's obviously very exciting for those having the IPO, and for those that are not, it's continuing to light a fire to perform and compete in an ever-growing buyer pool."

These days, luxury real estate agent Nina Hatvany of Compass said, it is normal for every "nice luxury property" in San Francisco to receive three to five offers.

Many employees at companies such as Anthropic and OpenAI have already been able to borrow money based on the stock wealth they expect to receive, she said. They have been "eager to find a place before the market goes completely nuts in their minds."

"The fact that Anthropic is actually now going to do it (the IPO) may intensify what's going on, but we've had this problem now for months: we've had constrained inventory at the high end and a lot of people who already had access to a lot of money," Hatvany said.

This imbalance could make the gap between rich and poor in San Francisco even wider. A relatively small group of people with valuable tech shares may be able to compete for a limited number of homes in desirable neighborhoods. People without that stock wealth may face higher home prices and rents as a result. But it remains unclear whether more homes will be built soon to ease the pressure, Rodway said.

An IPO could increase confidence in San Francisco's growth, but several things must come together before new housing projects become practical to build.

Higher rents are attracting investors and developers back to projects that had been put on hold. But builders say rents must rise even more for projects to make financial sense in today's economy. The cost of borrowing money and building homes has risen sharply, reducing the profits developers expect to make.

"Developers work on pencils and calculators - they don't work on emotion. Construction costs have been so prohibitive for developers as of recently," Rodway said.

Anthropic IPO could boost S.F. office market

Even before its IPO, Anthropic has made one of the biggest commitments to San Francisco office space in recent years. In January, it signed a 13-year lease for a building at 300 Howard St. with about 480,000 square feet of space. The deal expanded and brought together more of the company's downtown offices. Its existing leases at 500 and 505 Howard St. cover more than 300,000 square feet in total and expire in 2028.

Anthropic's downtown campus is part of a wider recovery in the office market, which AI companies have already been helping to drive. San Francisco recorded five straight quarters in which companies took up more office space than they gave up, through the third quarter of the year. The amount of space taken up was the highest since 2018. Still, nearly 30% of the city's office space remained empty, showing how much space still needs tenants.

An IPO could give Anthropic more money to hire workers and expand, but the company's office deals have not depended on going public. Earlier this month, the Chronicle reported that Anthropic was considering expanding into an industrial building in a neighborhood south of downtown to create a research and development lab.

Anthropic faces enormous costs to build and run its AI systems. Any future benefit to San Francisco's office market will likely depend on how much the company grows its local workforce and where it chooses to put its offices.

For now, Anthropic's existing lease on Howard Street is a clearer sign of its commitment to San Francisco than the IPO is of what the company will do next.