Shares of the Tema Photonics & Optical ETF (LAZR) leapt 15% to $47.88 on September 3 after the fund announced it had raised its stake in Anthropic — the AI company behind the Claude chatbot — to 15% of the portfolio, up from roughly 12% in July. The move is a direct bet on what could become the largest IPO in history, but it packs outsize risk into a fund with modest assets.

  • A Small Fund Making a Giant Private Bet. LAZR's assets under management stand at roughly $74 million , yet 15% of the portfolio — approximately $11 million — now sits in a single pre-IPO company that cannot be freely traded. The Anthropic position is marked at an implied $1.39 trillion valuation , a premium to Anthropic's last primary round of around $965 billion but below secondary-market pricing. If Anthropic's IPO lands at the reported $2 trillion target, that gap represents a built-in gain of roughly 44% on LAZR's Anthropic slice alone — a windfall that would add several percentage points to the ETF's total return.

  • The IPO Catalyst Is Real, but the Timeline Is Uncertain. Anthropic confidentially submitted a draft S-1 to the SEC on June 1, 2026 , and the filing targets an October 2026 Nasdaq listing with Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Morgan Stanley leading an offering expected to raise more than $60 billion . The company's annualized revenue reportedly exceeded $65 billion by end of July , a staggering pace that underpins the valuation — but the S-1 remains confidential, so investors are flying partly blind.

  • Liquidity Risk Cuts Both Ways. Disposing of non-exchange-traded securities "may involve time-consuming negotiation and legal expenses, and selling them promptly at an acceptable price may be difficult or impossible." In plain English: if markets sour or the IPO is delayed, Tema cannot easily exit, and LAZR's price could gap sharply lower.

  • A Photonics Fund in Name Only? Critics note the Anthropic position "doesn't make sense as a holding in a photonics fund."

Other ETFs hold far less: KraneShares' AGIX carries just 2.7% in Anthropic . Tema is effectively marketing pre-IPO AI exposure under a niche-sector label — clever positioning, but it transforms the fund's risk profile. Investors buying LAZR today are making a concentrated, illiquid wager on a single private company reaching a $2 trillion public valuation. That is less diversified portfolio management than venture-stage conviction.