Banks exclude Chinese and Hong Kong investors from Anthropic IPO

Chinese investors shut out of the listing

Investors from mainland China and Hong Kong are being excluded from Anthropic's initial public offering, according to Bloomberg. Several banks handling the share sale have turned away buy orders from those regions, and others consider allocations there unlikely.

Some of the people involved pointed to ITAR, the United States export control framework that covers defence-related goods and services, as the reason for the exclusions. Anthropic declined to comment on the reports.

How the share sale is structured

Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are running the offering, and a further 20 banks are taking part.

The reported restrictions echo what happened when SpaceX went public, when similar limits applied to investors from the region.

A tense relationship with China

Anthropic's services are not officially offered in China or Hong Kong, so the IPO restrictions extend an existing separation rather than create a new one. The company has previously blocked firms under Chinese control from using its AI services.

The relationship has been openly confrontational. Anthropic says it is fighting workarounds that let Chinese companies reach Claude Code, its coding tool. It has also disclosed large-scale distillation attempts, a technique where one AI model is trained to copy another's outputs, involving DeepSeek, Moonshot and MiniMax. According to the company, these attempts used around 16 million queries.

Why it matters

The move shows how US export controls, originally written for weapons and defence technology, now shape who can own shares in a leading AI company. It also signals that AI firms with possible defence relevance may face investment limits similar to those long applied to aerospace companies.

For investors in Hong Kong, the exclusion is notable because the city is treated differently from the mainland in many financial contexts. The reports come from Bloomberg and have not been confirmed by Anthropic, so the exact legal reasoning remains unverified.