Anthropic said Monday it has confidentially filed a prospectus with the Securities and Exchange Commission for an initial public offering, moving the maker of the Claude chatbot ahead of OpenAI in the race to bring the artificial-intelligence boom to public markets at a valuation that closed in May at $965 billion.
The filing puts the largest pure-play AI company on a path to list within months and sets up the broadest public-market referendum yet on whether the spending behind the AI buildout can translate into durable profits. Anthropic last week disclosed a $47 billion annualized revenue run rate, up from $10 billion in annual revenue a year earlier, and a fresh $65 billion funding round that lifted its private valuation past OpenAI's $852 billion mark from late March.
"This gives us the option to go public after the SEC completes its review," Anthropic said in a statement. "The proposed initial public offering will depend on market conditions and other factors."
The company has not set a share count or price range. A confidential filing lets the issuer trade drafts with SEC staff before any public S-1 lands with investors, which under SEC rules must occur at least 15 days before a roadshow begins.
The 2026 IPO queue
Anthropic is the second of three near-trillion-dollar candidates to reach the SEC's desk this spring. Elon Musk's SpaceX, which acquired the xAI startup behind the Grok chatbot in February, filed publicly on May 20 and is set to launch its roadshow June 4 with a share sale as early as June 11, targeting roughly $75 billion at a valuation near $1.75 trillion, Fox Business reported. OpenAI is working with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley on its own confidential draft and aiming to go public as early as September at a valuation of up to $1 trillion, according to Reuters reporting cited by Fox.
Goldman Sachs forecast earlier this year that U.S. IPO proceeds could reach a record $160 billion in 2026 if the marquee names list. Wedbush Securities analysts told clients Monday in a research note that the cluster of filings represents "an opening of the floodgates for the IPO market" and that the contest among Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI has turned into a race to the tape.
What Anthropic is selling
Dario Amodei and several other former OpenAI researchers founded Anthropic in 2021 around what they described as a safety-first approach to large language models. The company's Claude family powers a coding assistant, Claude Code, that has driven much of the recent revenue surge, and Claude reached the top spot on Apple's chart of free U.S. apps in late February.
Anthropic has also pulled forward billions in compute commitments to keep up with demand. The company agreed last month to pay SpaceX $1.25 billion a month through May 2029 for capacity at the Colossus 1 data center in Memphis, Tennessee, CNBC reported, citing SpaceX's prospectus. Either party can terminate on 90 days' notice.
Washington overhang
The IPO arrives with an unresolved fight with the federal government attached. After Amodei refused to let the Defense Department use Claude to power fully autonomous weapons or to conduct mass surveillance of Americans, President Trump ordered agencies to stop working with Anthropic, canceling more than $200 million in federal contracts, CBS News reported. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth labeled the company "a supply chain risk to national security."
Anthropic sued to reverse the blacklisting and that litigation is pending. Trump told CNBC in April that a deal between the company and the Pentagon is "possible." In the months since the Pentagon order, Anthropic disclosed a cybersecurity-focused model called Claude Mythos Preview and has been briefing senior Trump administration officials on its capabilities, CNBC reported.
Counterpoint
Skeptics on both flanks have reasons to wait. CBS News noted that some investors and outside experts continue to question whether the massive data-center spending behind frontier AI will produce profits commensurate with private-market valuations, and whether the technology will prove as transformative for corporate customers as its backers insist. The Pentagon dispute compounds the question: a company that lost more than $200 million in federal contracts and was branded a national-security risk by the sitting defense secretary is asking public-market investors to underwrite a valuation that already exceeds OpenAI's, with the litigation still open and no settlement in hand.
The next dated marker is SpaceX's June 4 roadshow, which will give Anthropic and OpenAI a live read on how deep public-market demand for AI runs before either follows it to the tape.