Three companies worth nearly $3 trillion combined are racing to IPO within months of each other, and Wall Street is starting to wonder whether the stock market can handle it.
Anthropic kicked off the week by filing a confidential S-1 with the SEC, beating OpenAI to the IPO punch just days after its latest funding round pushed its valuation past its chief rival. The Claude AI maker closed a $65 billion Series H round in late May, landing at a $965 billion post-money valuation, vaulting ahead of OpenAI's $852 billion mark from March.
SpaceX is already further along. Elon Musk's company plans to launch its roadshow as early as June 4 and finalize pricing around June 11, targeting a valuation of $1.8 trillion to $2 trillion with a fundraising size of up to $75 billion.
OpenAI is targeting a September IPO. Anthropic is expected to officially launch its listing process this fall. The combined fundraising for the three could exceed $200 billion, per TradingKey analysis.
Bank of America is sounding alarms. Chief Investment Strategist Michael Hartnett warned that the listings of SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic could push the technology sector's weight in the S&P 500 past the 48% historical threshold, exceeding concentration peaks from the Roaring Twenties, the Nifty Fifty era, Japan's 1980s bubble, and the TMT bubble of the 1990s.
Citigroup has described the current market as "highly frothy." The concern isn't just about valuations. More than 600 current and former OpenAI employees have sold $6.6 billion in company stock through the secondary market ahead of its IPO, an early exit that analysts view as a negative signal about valuation peaks.
"The combined demand for capital from SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic will be so considerable that it is likely to create disruptions in the capital markets," Davidson analyst Gil Luria told Reuters. "Going early will be a great advantage."
Anthropic's decision to file first fits that logic. The company has some advantages over its rivals: it reportedly earns more revenue than OpenAI despite a fraction of the user base, thanks in part to Claude Code's traction with developers. The Wall Street Journal reported that Anthropic is on the verge of reporting its first quarter of operating profit. But the Register notes that as a private company, Anthropic isn't required to post financials that reflect reality, the word "profit" can exclude all sorts of expenses. Its IPO filing, once made public, will be the first real look behind the secrecy that AI firms have operated behind.
Jim Cramer, writing for CNBC, put it bluntly: these three deals "will define 2026 and maybe even 2027." He called Anthropic his favorite pick, a business-to-business company with an annual revenue run rate that has crossed $47 billion, but warned that by the time it reaches the public market, investor cash may be depleted from the SpaceX and OpenAI deals. The U.S. IPO market has regained some momentum, with companies raising $87.5 billion through May 26, the highest year-to-date total since 2021, per Dealogic data. But that was before three behemoths with a combined $3 trillion in valuations showed up at the same door.
Anthropic's valuation has more than doubled from $380 billion in February, when it raised $30 billion. At close to $1 trillion, it would vault into the top tier of the S&P 500 alongside the most elite companies in global equity markets, if the market can find room for it.
