Artificial intelligence (AI) heavyweight Anthropic announced Monday that it has confidentially filed for a U.S. initial public offering. The decision secures an early lead over rival OpenAI in a high-stakes race to dominate public markets and the future of generative AI.
The confidential submission allows Anthropic to advance its listing preparations with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission while shielding sensitive financial data from competitors. While the company has not yet disclosed the size or terms of the offering, the market debut is poised to be one of the most consequential in history.
Last week, the San Francisco-based firm closed a massive funding round of $65 billion from top-tier institutional investors that include Blackstone, Brookfield Asset Management, and General Catalyst. The round catapulted Anthropic’s post-money valuation to a whopping $965 billion — vaulting it past OpenAI and positioning it to enter the top tier of the S&P 500 upon its debut.
The company also revealed its annualized revenue run-rate has skyrocketed to $47 billion, driven by the rapid enterprise adoption of its Claude chatbot subscriptions and its advanced agentic coding tool, Claude Code.
“A massive moment bringing the third of three trillion dollar IPOs a step closer to reality,” said Daniel Newman, CEO of The Futurum Group. “Hard not to see Anthropic surpassing OpenAI’s eye watering valuation on its impressive growth. The market will have to adapt to so much liquidity being pulled in so few directions.”
Gil Luria, an analyst at D.A. Davidson, said that beating OpenAI to public markets gives Anthropic a distinct strategic edge, allowing it to “set the agenda for how a frontier model reports financials.”
“We’re about to find out whether the market thinks AI is a consumer story or an enterprise story,” Emarketer AI analyst Nate Elliott said in an email. “Because while Claude has built a solid enterprise user base, it’s just not competitive as a consumer AI platform.”
The market research firm projects that just 5.4% of U.S. internet users will utilize Claude in 2026. This puts the platform significantly behind its primary competitors: OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which leads the market with a projected 36.6% adoption rate, and Google’s Gemini, which follows closely at 27.4%.
The impending listing joins a blockbuster lineup of mega-IPOs. Elon Musk’s SpaceX recently made its prospectus public for a $75 billion offering at a $1.75 trillion valuation, with trading expected to begin on June 12.
Meanwhile, sources say OpenAI is preparing its own confidential filing. Analysts at Wedbush Securities declared the trio of listings an “opening of the floodgates” for a long-sluggish IPO market, which has already seen companies raise $87.5 billion through late May, the highest year-to-date total since 2021. However, experts warn that the sheer volume of capital demanded by these three giants could temporarily drain liquidity from smaller listings.
“It is a real surprise. Anthropic just did a round,” said John Newton, chief innovation strategist at Hyland. “The revenue is not a hockey stick but a wall. But Anthropic is like a Swiss passport: They place nice with everyone, and their enterprise business is taking off.”
Anthropic’s path to the public markets has not been without controversy.
Founded in 2021 by ex-OpenAI defectors led by CEO Dario Amodei, the company made headlines earlier this year after refusing to allow its technology to power fully autonomous military weapons. The clash resulted in the Trump administration canceling more than $200 million in federal contracts and blacklisting the firm from Pentagon use.
Despite ongoing litigation against the administration, Anthropic’s private sector growth has only accelerated. The company recently captivated Wall Street with its Claude Mythos Preview cybersecurity model and secured a massive infrastructure deal, agreeing to pay SpaceX $1.25 billion per month through 2029 to utilize its Colossus 1 data center in Memphis, Tenn.
As Anthropic gears up for its roadshow, the upcoming IPO will serve as the ultimate test of whether public investor appetite can match the sky-high expectations of the AI revolution.
