Three of the most valuable private companies ever built are racing toward the public markets in the same window, and Anthropic just fired the starting gun. The Claude maker filed a confidential S-1 with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday, announcing its plan to go public this year. The filing sets neither a share count nor a price, though the company said timing "will depend on market conditions and other factors."
Anthropic's move comes just days after it closed a $65 billion funding round from Altimeter Capital, Greenoaks, Dragoneer, and Sequoia Capital, pushing its valuation to $965 billion. That nearly tripled its $380 billion valuation from roughly three months ago and vaulted it past OpenAI, which last raised at $852 billion. The math is staggering. Anthropic's annualized revenue crossed $47 billion in May, up from $30 billion earlier this year and $10 billion in all of last year. The company has told investors it expects to turn a profit in the first half of 2026, a claim neither SpaceX nor OpenAI can make.
"Neither Anthropic nor OpenAI wants to be the last major AI pure-play to list," Troy Hooper, a leader of equity capital markets at Mergermarket, told the BBC. "The first mover has a real chance to define how public markets value generative AI."
Anthropic is racing OpenAI and SpaceX to the bell. SpaceX, which merged with xAI earlier this year, is furthest along with a public filing and roadshow reportedly beginning in early June, targeting around a $1.8 trillion valuation.
OpenAI is also preparing its own confidential prospectus, with Business Insider reporting in mid-May that the ChatGPT-maker was moving toward an IPO as early as this month. The congestion is historic. Pitchbook analyst Harrison Rolfes called Anthropic's IPO "the most scrutinized public offering in tech history," and said the two AI companies alongside SpaceX "represent the largest concentration of pre-IPO capital ever brought to market simultaneously."
Anthropic's business is deeply entangled with SpaceX. Elon Musk's rocket and AI company is renting $1.25 billion a month of compute to Anthropic, according to SpaceX's own S-1 filing from May. That relationship could face new scrutiny once both companies are public. The IPO push also reignites questions about Anthropic's relationship with the federal government. The company entered a standoff with the Pentagon in February over contractual language that would have allowed "any lawful use" of its AI, including surveillance and autonomous weapons. The Pentagon declared Anthropic a supply chain risk and ordered defense contractors to cut ties. Anthropic sued, and the case is ongoing despite signs of cooling tensions from the White House.
Anthropic founder and CEO Dario Amodei, who holds just 1% of the company, could be worth tens of billions of dollars when the stock hits the market. The scramble for shares has already spawned a shadow economy of secondary market middlemen, with three New York brokers pleading guilty to fraud this year after raising $185 million from more than 1,000 investors in unauthorized share sales.
