Banks bar Chinese and Hong Kong investors from Anthropic IPO over US export controls

Investors from mainland China and Hong Kong are being shut out of Anthropic’s IPO, according to Bloomberg. Multiple banks have reportedly rejected buy orders from those regions or consider allocations unlikely, with some of the people involved citing ITAR, the US export control rules governing defense-related goods, as the reason.

Anthropic declined to comment. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are leading the offering, with 20 other banks involved. The stock is expected to trade on Nasdaq under the ticker ANT after pricing on November 18. The company’s products aren’t officially available in China or Hong Kong, and its broader relationship with the country has been defined by confrontation. Anthropic has blocked firms under Chinese control from its AI services and is fighting workarounds that let Chinese companies access Claude Code. It also exposed large-scale distillation attacks by DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax involving some 16 million queries.AdAd Follow The Decoder for AI news, background stories and expert analyses.