The approach here is specific. Anthropic is private, and most public companies that hold a stake in it are so large that even a multi-billion dollar position barely registers against their market cap. Amazon holds roughly $29 billion in Anthropic equity. That sounds significant until you note it represents about 1.3% of a $2.2 trillion company. An Anthropic IPO at a $500 billion valuation would move Amazon's stock by a fraction of a percent. The same logic applies to Alphabet, Nvidia, and Microsoft.
The only vehicles where an Anthropic stake actually moves the needle in a material way are those where the position represents a double-digit percentage of the company's own market cap. That screen eliminates almost everything and leaves a short list worth examining closely.
Why Anthropic's Position Has Changed
At the end of 2025, the company's annualized revenue was still around $9 billion. Since then, that figure has more than tripled, crossing $30 billion and surpassing OpenAI's $25 billion run rate for the first time. That kind of growth trajectory does not happen in stable markets.
The composition matters as much as the number. Approximately 80% of Anthropic's revenue comes from enterprises, and seven out of every ten new customers are choosing Anthropic over alternatives. Enterprise revenue compounds differently than consumer subscriptions. Once internal workflows are built on a model, the switching cost is real, and the expansion path is natural. OpenAI, by contrast, is losing money from consumers since it subsidizes the cost of their token usage.
Claude Code is the product doing the most damage to competitors right now. It holds a 54% market share in the AI programming tool segment, with annual revenue surpassing $2.5 billion, far exceeding GitHub Copilot and Cursor. Developer tooling creates deep workflow dependencies. Engineers do not just use a product. They build systems around it.
The margin trajectory is turning faster than expected. Anthropic went from negative 94% gross margin in 2025 to an estimated 40% in 2026, with a projected path toward 77% by 2028, mirroring CrowdStrike and Cloudflare's first four years as public companies. The IPO case rests on whether that 40% materializes this year. If it does, the valuation at listing becomes a different conversation entirely.
The Ranking
The proxies below are ranked by Anthropic stake value as a percentage of the company's own market cap, from highest to lowest. Vehicles where the stake is immaterial relative to market cap are excluded entirely.
1. SK Telecom (SKM): Anthropic Stake at Roughly 17-19% of Market Cap
South Korea's largest wireless carrier controls roughly 50% of the country's mobile market and serves around 23 million subscribers. The core business is wireless connectivity, fixed-line broadband, IPTV, and an expanding AI data center division. AI data center revenue reached KRW 519.9 billion in 2025, up 34.9% year-over-year, driven by higher utilization at the Gasan and Yangju facilities and the acquisition of a new Pangyo data center. The company is also building an additional AI data center in Seoul and a joint data center with Amazon Web Services in Ulsan. Its AI consumer product, an agent platform called A-Dot, reached 11.2 million users in Q4 2025. Wireless and fixed-line together account for approximately 98% of consolidated revenue.
The business reality is complicated. SK Telecom's consolidated revenue declined 4.7% year-over-year in 2025 to KRW 17.1 trillion, while operating income dropped 41.1% and net income collapsed 73% year-over-year. A major cybersecurity breach in 2025 cost the company dearly in regulatory fines and customer trust, forced a dividend cut, and dragged profitability to multi-year lows. The core telecom business grows slowly in the low single digits on a good year.
What makes SKM structurally different from every other proxy: SK Telecom invested $100 million in Anthropic in 2023, acquiring an initial stake of approximately 0.7%. That stake has diluted through subsequent rounds. Following Anthropic's $380 billion Series G, SKM's Anthropic position is now estimated to be worth $1.9 billion to $2.3 billion, equivalent to roughly 15 to 20% of SK Telecom's entire market cap. No trillion-dollar tech company can say that. An Anthropic IPO is a liquidity event that could materially redefine the stock's sum-of-parts valuation.
The risk is real: the underlying telecom business is declining, not growing. The cybersecurity incident leaves a governance overhang. And the stock has attracted retail speculation in Korean markets driven by the Anthropic narrative, which means the entry price matters. When sentiment gets ahead of itself, the Anthropic premium can overshoot what the math justifies, and the stock can reprice sharply when it does. Approached carefully on pullbacks, SKM offers the highest Anthropic exposure-to-market-cap ratio of any publicly traded company.
2. Zoom Video Communications (ZM): Anthropic Stake at Roughly 10-15% of Market Cap
Zoom's core product is its unified communications platform, covering video meetings, cloud phone, team chat, and an expanding suite of workplace collaboration tools including Docs, Rooms, and an AI assistant called Companion. The company generated $4.87 billion in revenue for fiscal year 2026, up 4.4% year-over-year. Enterprise revenue reached $2.93 billion for the full year, up 6.5% year-over-year, and online revenue was $1.93 billion, up 1.2%. Non-GAAP operating margin was 40.4%, and the company ended the year with $7.9 billion in cash and investments.
The operating picture is stable, not exciting. Enterprise retention is just below 100%, reflecting mild churn headwinds. Consumer usage is essentially flat. Revenue growth in the 4-5% range is the ceiling in the near term as Zoom competes against Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, and a broadening set of AI-native communication tools. The company is profitable and cash-generative, which provides a financial floor.
The Anthropic angle is where the story shifts. In May 2023, Zoom Ventures invested $51 million in Anthropic when the startup was valued at around $4.5 billion. That investment is now estimated to be worth $2 to $4 billion at Anthropic's current $380 billion valuation, representing an approximately 78-fold return on the original capital. Against a market cap of roughly $23 to $27 billion, the Anthropic stake represents somewhere between 10 and 15% of Zoom's value.
The structure is cleaner than SKM. Zoom's operating business is genuinely cash-generative and not in crisis. The $7.9 billion cash pile provides further cushion. The Anthropic stake effectively sits on top of a profitable enterprise software company as a free call option on one of the most anticipated IPOs in years. The main risk is that Zoom's core revenue growth rate continues to slow as AI-native tools commoditize basic video and voice collaboration, eroding the underlying business over time. At current valuations, the Anthropic stake alone approaches the implied price being paid for Zoom's operating business after stripping out cash.
3. AGIX (KraneShares Artificial Intelligence ETF): 3.4% of Fund Directly in Anthropic
AGIX is an exchange-traded fund that holds a combination of publicly listed AI companies and direct equity positions in select private AI firms. The top holdings are Nvidia at 5.22%, Microsoft at 3.95%, Meta at 3.59%, SpaceX at 3.46%, and Anthropic at 3.41%. The fund tracks the Solactive Etna Artificial General Intelligence Index for its public equity sleeve and supplements that with private positions in companies like Anthropic and SpaceX.
AGIX provides access to Anthropic through a daily-liquid, NAV-based ETF structure available via standard brokerage accounts, without private-market lockups, capital calls, or accreditation requirements. The expense ratio is 0.99%. The Anthropic position is real direct equity, not an approximation through a mega-cap holding company. The tradeoff is that it represents only 3.4% of the fund, so Anthropic's trajectory is one of many drivers of performance. A double in Anthropic's valuation moves AGIX by roughly 3 percentage points, all else equal.
For investors who want clean, liquid, daily-priced Anthropic exposure without leverage, speculation risk, or the operational baggage of a telecom or video conferencing company, AGIX is the most structurally sound vehicle on this list. The concentration is lower, but the structure is honest.
4. VCX (Fundrise Innovation Fund): 20.7% of Fund NAV in Anthropic, but Avoid at Current Prices
The fund holds direct equity in Anthropic as its largest position. Anthropic makes up 21% of VCX's total assets, followed by Databricks at 18%, OpenAI at 10%, Anduril at 7%, and SpaceX at 5%. On paper, this is the highest Anthropic concentration of any publicly traded vehicle.
The problem is the price. Shares soared more than 1,500% above net asset value within days of listing in March 2026, as investors pushed the market cap far beyond the estimated worth of the fund's holdings. Morningstar's equity strategies team noted that at any significant premium to NAV, "your upside is gone," and called it a vehicle that attracts speculative activity but represents a poor long-term investment at inflated prices. Citron Research shorted the fund and called the premium structurally indefensible. VCX trading at 10x, 15x, or even 5x its NAV means you are paying a massive speculative premium for access rather than the underlying value of the Anthropic stake itself.
VCX is worth monitoring. When and if the premium compresses toward NAV, the structure becomes genuinely interesting. Until that happens, buying VCX is paying meme-stock prices for a private equity portfolio. The access is real. The current price is not.
What the Screen Actually Shows
Every proxy on this list is imperfect. SKM carries a weakening core business and governance risk from last year's breach. Zoom's operating trajectory is modest at best. AGIX is diluted across 62 holdings. The cleanest Anthropic exposure available in public markets today still comes with meaningful tradeoffs attached to it. That is the nature of accessing a private company through the back door.
The right question is not which proxy is clean. None of them are. The question is which tradeoffs are acceptable given the size and timing of an Anthropic position. For investors who want maximum leverage to an Anthropic IPO and can tolerate the operational noise of a declining Korean telecom, SKM is the answer. For those who want the cleanest business underlying the stake, Zoom is the better structure. For those who want daily liquidity and no single-company risk on the operating side, AGIX is the lowest-noise entry.
This is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.
