Anthropic races toward a Wall Street debut with a confidential SEC
filing
[June 02, 2026] By
MATT O'BRIEN
Artificial intelligence company Anthropic is moving toward going public
on Wall Street, the latest chapter in its meteoric rise from a
little-known research laboratory to one of the leading AI companies
valued at $965 billion.
Anthropic said Monday it has submitted a confidential filing with the
U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for a proposed initial public
offering 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 or price of shares to
be offered.
Anthropic said last week it had raised $65 billion in private funding
that will push its valuation to $965 billion, a whopping number that
makes the five-year-old maker of the Claude chatbot one of the world’s
most valuable startups.
Anthropic now has vaulted ahead of its chief rival, ChatGPT maker OpenAI,
not only in market value and reported revenue but also on the path to
becoming a publicly traded company.
“I think we were all expecting OpenAI to go first, so it was a little
bit surprising,” said Patrick Corrigan, a law professor at Notre Dame
University who studies IPOs. “Public investors are going to be comparing
them roughly around the same time, and so there seems to be a bit of a
first movers’ advantage here.”
Anthropic said it’s now making annualized revenue of $47 billion from
selling its technology to people and organizations using Claude to write
code and do other work and personal tasks on their behalf.
Anthropic was formed in 2021 by ex-OpenAI leaders and now both AI firms,
along with Elon Musk’s rocket and AI company SpaceX, are all expected to
become publicly traded. All three have been losing more money than they
make, fueling concerns of an AI bubble.
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 startups 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.
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 “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.”
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 last week launched its newest AI
model, called Claude Opus 4.8, boasting that it is even better at
coding and other professional work than previous models.
OpenAI last reported in March it was heading toward a $852 billion
valuation after a $122 billion fundraising round. It has not yet
reported filing initial IPO paperwork with the SEC.
SpaceX was valued at $800 billion last year, but its value grew to
$1.25 trillion 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.
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 organizations, but they’ve had to
mature in a very short period,” he said.
As for 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 startups' 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 skeptics 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.”
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