## [# Anthropic Is the New SpaceX for ETF Issuers](/sections/features/anthropic-new-spacex-etf-issuers)
# Anthropic Is the New SpaceX for ETF Issuers
Three weeks after launch, a photonics fund put 12% of its assets into Anthropic ahead of the IPO.
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[By Sumit Roy ](/authors/sumit-roy)
Jul 24, 2026
Edited by: ETF.com Staff
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Getting into SpaceX early was spectacularly lucrative. The venture investors who bought years ago at a fraction of the listing price made a fortune on it. But early is relative, and the investors who piled into certain ETFs to get exposure to the company ahead of its IPO did not fare nearly as well.
That said, the issuers of those funds did great.
## The SpaceX Blueprint
The [**Tema Space Innovators ETF (NASA)**](/nasa) launched at the end of March and had as much as $3.3 billion in AUM less than three months later, one of the fastest asset-gathering runs the industry has ever seen, almost entirely because it held about 10% of the portfolio in SpaceX through a special purpose vehicle.
The [**ERShares Private-Public Crossover ETF (XOVR)**](/xovr) became an almost $2 billion fund by buying SpaceX more than a year before the listing. The [**Baron First Principles ETF (RONB)**](/ronb) also got a big boost from offering investors pre-IPO exposure to SpaceX.
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## Next Up: Anthropic
So it was only a matter of time before issuers pointed the same playbook at the next mega-IPO in the queue. That would be Anthropic, which filed a confidential S-1 with the SEC on June 1 and is reportedly targeting an October listing at a valuation that could be well over a trillion.
The most aggressive expression of that bet so far is the [**Tema Photonics & Optical ETF (LAZR)**](/lazr), which recently added Anthropic through an SPV. The position was 12% of net assets when Tema announced it, and sits around 10.6% now, second only to Lumentum Holdings Inc. The fund launched on June 30 and has $19 million in assets.
Tema noted that LAZR's SPV Anthropic exposure carries no management fee, no performance fee, no brokerage fee and no redemption fee, so the fund's 75 basis point expense ratio is unchanged.
The position will be held at cost until the IPO, and Tema says it will keep adding until the final S-1 is filed. Tema also says the SPV was priced at a premium to Anthropic's last primary round of around $950 billion and at a discount to where it currently trades in the secondary market.
Other funds own Anthropic, but nowhere near this size. The [**KraneShares Artificial Intelligence and Technology ETF (AGIX)**](/agix) currently has 2.7% of its portfolio in the company. The [**iShares A.I. Innovation and Tech Active ETF (BAI)**](/bai) has 0.8% of its portfolio in the company.
## The Part That Doesn't Add Up
The Anthropic position makes sense from a marketing perspective. It may even make sense as an investment if you're bullish on Anthropic specifically or AI broadly. But it doesn't make sense as a holding in a photonics fund.
LAZR's prospectus is specific about what belongs in the portfolio. The fund commits at least 80% of net assets to companies where at least half of annual revenue comes from designing, making or selling optical transceivers and modules, laser sources, silicon photonics integrated circuits, optical interconnect systems, photonic substrates, industrial and defense lasers, photodetectors, fiber optic cable, optical computing hardware and the equipment used to build any of it.
Anthropic sells access to large language models. It has begun tiptoeing toward custom chips with Broadcom, but that is an early, tentative endeavor, and still does not make it a photonics play.
Investors are interested in photonics right now because AI clusters have outgrown copper wiring. Once you wire hundreds of thousands of GPUs together to train a model, electrical signaling can't move data between them fast enough without melting or burning enormous amounts of power, so the industry is switching to moving data with light.
But Anthropic is a customer of that technology, not a supplier of it. Owning it on those grounds is a bit like putting Microsoft in a copper miners ETF because the company’s data centers use a lot of copper.
That said, none of this is a rules violation. The prospectus reserves 20% of assets for holdings outside the strict photonics definition, and the Anthropic stake fits there. But it still dilutes the theme.
Will investors care? Maybe they will or maybe they won't. NASA proved the appetite for pre-IPO exposure is real. But it's still a puzzling addition to a fund built around a specific slice of the AI infrastructure supply chain, and a reminder that a fund’s name only tells you so much about what's actually in the portfolio.
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[ Sumit Roy Senior ETF Analyst ](/authors/sumit-roy)
Sumit Roy is the senior ETF analyst for etf.com and author of (Don't) Invest Like a Pro. He creates a variety of content for the platform, including… [View Bio](/authors/sumit-roy)
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