Anthropic files for IPO, moves ahead of OpenAI in AI race

Anthropic has taken the first formal step toward a public listing, filing confidentially with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for a proposed initial public offering of its common stock. The move puts the Claude maker ahead of OpenAI in the race to reach public markets and sets up one of the most closely watched tech offerings in years.

The company said the timing will depend on market conditions and other factors, and it has not yet set the number of shares to be offered or the price. Anthropic also said, “This gives us the option to go public after the SEC completes its review.” For investors, the filing is less a celebration than a stress test: public ownership would force far more disclosure on growth, spending, competition, and the economics of building frontier AI at scale.

That scrutiny arrives after a torrid stretch of expansion. Anthropic announced a $65 billion funding round on May 28, giving it a $965 billion post-money valuation, and said its annualized revenue run rate reached $47 billion in May. That was up from $30 billion earlier in 2026 and $10 billion last year, a staggering pace that will now be judged against the costs of sustaining it. The company has also said it now serves more than 300,000 business and enterprise customers.

Founded in 2021 by former OpenAI researchers Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei, Anthropic has built Claude around enterprise use cases while presenting itself as an AI safety and research company focused on reliable, interpretable and steerable systems. Claude is central to its commercial success, and the filing will put a harder spotlight on how much of that success depends on a handful of large customers, outside compute providers and the enormous capital demands of training and serving frontier models.

The IPO also lands amid wider policy and reputational risk. In February, Anthropic said its technology had been deployed across the U.S. Department of War and the intelligence community, but it also said the Department of War designated it a supply-chain risk and that it would challenge the move in court. Those issues, along with the company’s reliance on costly infrastructure and safety research, are the kind of details public markets will demand in full.

Anthropic had already been laying groundwork for a listing, having discussed an IPO as early as 2026 with Wilson Sonsini and major investment banks. Now the company is on the path from private AI star to public-company accountability, with the next phase of the boom likely measured not just by ambition, but by margins, disclosures and the market’s patience.