TL;DR
Anthropic has confidentially filed S-1 paperwork for an IPO, potentially beating rival OpenAI to the public market this fall. The filing follows a $65 billion funding round at a $965 billion valuation and projected Q2 revenue of $10.9 billion, with Anthropic on pace for its first profitable quarter.
Anthropic has confidentially submitted draft registration paperwork for an initial public offering with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company announced in a blog post on Monday. The number of shares to be offered and the price have not been set. The filing positions Anthropic to potentially reach the public market as soon as this fall, ahead of rival OpenAI, which is also preparing its own confidential IPO filing in the coming weeks.
The move comes days after Anthropic raised $65 billion in a funding round at a $965 billion valuation, eclipsing OpenAI’s valuation for the first time. The round was led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, and Sequoia Capital. Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, and Morgan Stanley are expected to be under consideration for lead underwriting roles on both Anthropic’s and OpenAI’s listings.
The revenue trajectory
Anthropic’s financial growth over the past 12 months has been extraordinary even by AI startup standards. The company’s annualised revenue run rate was $4 billion in July 2025. By January 2026 it had surpassed $9 billion. Anthropic has told investors that the run rate will exceed $50 billion by the end of July, representing roughly an 80-fold increase in annualised revenue over two years.
The company expects to report $10.9 billion in revenue for the second quarter of 2026, more than doubling the $4.8 billion it generated in Q1 and exceeding its entire 2025 annual revenue in a single quarter. Anthropic is also on pace for its first profitable quarter, with a projected operating profit of $559 million. Early investors like Accel, whose Anthropic stake has more than quadrupled in months, now have a clear path to liquidity.
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The growth has been driven by a surge in enterprise demand for Claude’s coding capabilities and, more recently, by Anthropic’s Mythos cybersecurity model, which discovered more than 10,000 zero-day vulnerabilities across major operating systems and has become the most discussed AI capability in enterprise security.
The three-way IPO race
Anthropic’s filing sets up what could be the most significant cluster of technology IPOs since the dot-com era. OpenAI is preparing its own confidential filing and has targeted a public debut in the fall at a potential valuation of up to $1 trillion. SpaceX has already filed for the largest IPO in history, with marketing set for early June. All three companies are backed by overlapping pools of sovereign wealth funds and institutional investors, and all three are likely to draw on Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Morgan Stanley for underwriting.
For Anthropic, filing first carries a strategic advantage. The company that reaches the public market ahead of its rival gets first access to the broadest possible pool of institutional and retail investors, sets the valuation benchmark for the AI sector, and defines the narrative around which AI company represents the best public market bet.
The competitive dynamic between the two companies has intensified this year. While Anthropic has posted an 80-fold annualised revenue increase and surpassed OpenAI in valuation, OpenAI has been rethinking its product lineup, shuffling leadership, and confronting reports that it missed certain internal revenue and user targets. OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar has pushed back, telling Bloomberg the company is seeing a “vertical wall of demand” for its products.
Risks in the filing
Anthropic’s S-1, when it becomes public, will need to disclose several material risks. The most prominent is the company’s ongoing legal battle with the US government after the Pentagon declared Anthropic a supply-chain risk, a designation typically reserved for foreign adversaries. The dispute stems from Anthropic’s refusal to grant the military unrestricted access to its models. Anthropic has said the designation could jeopardise billions of dollars in revenue.
The $965 billion valuation also carries scrutiny. At $10.9 billion in projected Q2 revenue, Anthropic would be trading at roughly 22x annualised revenue, a premium that assumes continued hypergrowth. If the $50 billion run rate materialises by July, the multiple compresses to a more defensible 19x, but that figure depends on maintaining the pace of enterprise adoption that drove the Q1-to-Q2 doubling.
There is also the question of whether profitability is sustainable. Anthropic’s projected $559 million operating profit in Q2 represents a roughly 5% margin, thin for a company seeking a near-trillion-dollar public valuation. The economics of running frontier AI models at scale remain expensive, and compute costs could compress margins as the company scales. The University of Michigan turned a $20 million early OpenAI investment into $2 billion, a reminder that early AI bets can produce extraordinary returns, but public market investors will demand more predictable economics.
What it means for the market
Anthropic’s IPO filing, combined with OpenAI’s expected filing and SpaceX’s already-submitted paperwork, means the fall 2026 IPO window could see more than $200 billion in new public market value from three companies alone. The last time a cluster of technology offerings this large reached the public market simultaneously was the 1999-2000 dot-com wave.
The comparison is imperfect. Anthropic and OpenAI have real, rapidly growing revenue. SpaceX is profitable. But the valuations all assume that the AI market will continue expanding at its current pace, that enterprise adoption will not plateau, and that regulatory and legal risks will remain manageable. Anthropic’s confidential filing is the starting gun for the most consequential test of whether the AI boom can sustain public market scrutiny.
Stephan is the sports journalist for the Maple Grove Report.
