Anthropic files confidentially for IPO after $965 billion valuation surge

Anthropic took the first formal step toward a public listing by confidentially submitting a draft registration statement on Form S-1 to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for a proposed initial public offering of its common stock. The company said the move gives it the option to go public after regulators finish their review, but the timing, size and pricing of any share sale will still depend on market conditions and other factors.

The filing lands only days after Anthropic disclosed a $65 billion Series H that valued the company at $965 billion post-money, a leap that pushed the San Francisco-based maker of Claude into the highest tier of startup valuations. Anthropic said its annualized revenue run-rate had crossed $47 billion earlier in May, an eye-popping figure for a company founded only in 2021 by Dario Amodei, Daniela Amodei and other former OpenAI employees. The round was led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks and Sequoia Capital.

For Wall Street, the filing is less a ceremonial milestone than a test of whether the AI business model can survive public-market scrutiny. Private backers have tolerated sky-high capital needs and valuations tied to future growth; public investors will want to know whether Anthropic’s revenue is durable, how much cash the company is burning, how concentrated its business is among a handful of major partners and customers, and how exposed it is to legal and regulatory risk. In other words, the IPO process will force a broader answer to a simple question: is generative AI becoming a sustainable industry, or just entering a new phase of investor exuberance?

Anthropic has quickly become one of the most important rivals to OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT. CNBC reported that Anthropic is moving ahead of OpenAI, which is also preparing a confidential filing, while Bloomberg said Anthropic could target a Wall Street debut as soon as this fall. Reuters framed the filing as a watershed moment for Wall Street’s AI frenzy.

That competition matters because Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceX are all widely expected to reach public markets eventually, even though each is still losing more money than it makes. Anthropic’s filing now puts one of the sector’s most closely watched companies into the IPO pipeline, where the next round of questions will be far less forgiving than the ones private investors have been asking.