World's most valuable AI start-up Anthropic files for IPO: Five things to know
Anthropic appears to have gained an early lead over OpenAI in the race to go public. Its IPO filing signals that one of the industry's biggest players could become the first major generative AI company to reach public markets.
Artificial intelligence company Anthropic is moving towards a Wall Street debut, marking the latest chapter in its rise from a little-known research laboratory to one of the world's leading AI companies, valued at $965 billion (€840bn).
Anthropic said on Monday that it had submitted a confidential filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission for a proposed initial public offering (IPO) of its common stock.
“This gives us the option to go public after the SEC completes its review,” Anthropic said in a brief statement. “The proposed initial public offering will depend on market conditions and other factors.”
The company said it hasn't decided on the number of shares to be offered or their price.
Here's five things to know about the potential IPO and the firm's competition.
1. Anthropic could beat OpenAI
“I think we were all expecting OpenAI to go first, so it was a little bit surprising,” Patrick Corrigan, a law professor at Notre Dame University who studies IPOs, said.
“Public investors are going to be comparing them roughly around the same time, and so there seems to be a bit of a first-mover’s advantage here.”
Anthropic was formed in 2021 by ex-OpenAI leaders. Both AI firms, along with Elon Musk’s rocket and AI company SpaceX, are now all expected to become publicly traded.
OpenAI last reported in March that it was heading toward a $852bn (€741bn) valuation after a $122bn (€106bn) fundraising round. It has not yet publicly reported any plans to file for an IPO.
SpaceX, meanwhile, was valued at $800bn (€696bn) last year, but its value grew to $1.25 trillion (€1.09trn) after the space exploration company merged with Musk’s xAI in February. Musk recently announced plans for one of the biggest stock sales ever and will be able to pitch the offering to investors as soon as this week.
2. The company's valuation
Anthropic said last week it had raised $65bn (€57bn) in private funding, giving the company a valuation of $965bn, a number that makes the five-year-old maker of the Claude chatbot one of the world’s most valuable start-ups.
Anthropic's latest funding round gives it a higher reported valuation than OpenAI's most recently disclosed valuation and puts it ahead in the race to file for an IPO.
3. What investors are buying into
Anthropic said it is now making annualised revenue of $47bn (€41bn) from selling its technology to people and organisations using Claude to write code and do other work and personal tasks on their behalf.
Claude’s growing popularity has left OpenAI playing catch-up despite its early lead in making ChatGPT a household name that sparked a commercial AI boom.
Anthropic also launched last week its newest AI model, called Claude Opus 4.8, boasting that it is even better at coding and other professional work than previous models.
IDC analyst Tim Law said it will be a “healthy thing” for the AI industry when these companies are required to provide quarterly earnings reports and disclose some of their technology investments.
“We think of these as very mature organisations, but they’ve had to mature in a very short period,” he said.
4. Global IPO market shows strength
Anthropic's filing comes as the global market for new stock listings shows renewed strength, with investor interest in technology companies remaining high.
According to a recent report by KPMG, companies raised $42.6bn (€37bn) through 251 initial public offerings worldwide in the first three months of 2026, a 45% increase from a year earlier despite a 15% fall in the number of deals. The figures suggest investors are backing fewer but much larger listings.
KPMG said artificial intelligence and space technology companies are expected to be among the biggest drivers of IPO activity for the rest of the year.
Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives said Anthropic’s move marks a major step for the company to get ahead of OpenAI and "an opening of the floodgates for the IPO market, which has been relatively dormant for a few years, with these three major conglomerates set to go public later this year.”
Corrigan said the race between Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceX resembles in some ways the rush by start-ups to go public in the early internet era.
Some of those companies — like Amazon — did well, and others infamously failed during the dot-com crash but still left new technology that changed society and work life.
“Whenever there is speculation, there’s also usually substance and fundamentals,” Corrigan said.
“The question here is whether the price investors are going to end up paying is going to match up to the substance and fundamentals of what AI is really going to do in the real economy and as a business.”
5. The IPO could test AI bubble concerns
Anthropic, OpenAI and xAI are all spending heavily and have yet to demonstrate sustained profitability, fuelling concerns about a potential AI bubble.
As for those bubble concerns, Law, who rode the dot-com IPO wave while working for internet company VerticalNet in the early part of the century, said there's evidence from these AI start-ups' existing products to show they are on a path not just to profitability but to artificial general intelligence, technology that does work as well as or better than humans.
“There are some sceptics around demand. I thoroughly believe the demand is there and will grow,” Law said. “I think this funding round may be the thing that enables us to complete the final sprint toward AGI,” he added.
