OpenAI is racing to list before Anthropic. Anthropic is racing to list before OpenAI. The public markets are about to decide which AI lab is actually worth more.
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The AI lab behind Claude has filed confidentially for a US initial public offering. The IPO move came on June 1, 2026, just days after Anthropic closed a $65 billion funding round at a near-trillion-dollar valuation. It set off what could be one of the most consequential cluster of tech listings since the dot-com era.
Here is what is happening, why it matters, and what it means for the broader AI industry.
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Anthropic was founded in 2021 by Dario Amodei, his sister Daniela Amodei, and a group of researchers who left OpenAI over concerns about that company’s direction. The goal from day one was to build AI systems that were safe and interpretable. The business pitch was slower and more cautious than the competition.
That reputation has not gone away. But the numbers now tell a different story.
The company’s annualised revenue run rate stood at around $4 billion in mid-2025. By the end of that year it had crossed $9 billion. By April 2026, it had passed $30 billion. Anthropic has told investors the run rate will exceed $50 billion by the end of July, representing roughly an 80-fold increase in annualised revenue over two years.
That kind of growth is almost without precedent in enterprise software history.
Claude Code is the single biggest driver. The product, a coding assistant built on top of Anthropic’s models, became generally available in May 2025. It caught on fast with developers and enterprises alike. By the time of Anthropic’s Series G announcement in February 2026, Claude Code had already passed $2.5 billion in its own annualised revenue run rate.
The broader enterprise business has kept pace. More than 1,000 business customers now spend at least $1 million annually with Anthropic, and eight of the Fortune 10 are Claude customers. A few years ago, the company had fewer than 1,000 business customers of any size. Now it has over 300,000.
Roughly 80 percent of Anthropic’s revenue comes from enterprise customers, compared with around 40 percent for OpenAI. That skew toward corporate clients means Anthropic’s revenue tends to be stickier. Enterprise contracts are harder to cancel than individual subscriptions.
On June 1, 2026, Anthropic submitted confidential registration statement to Securities and Exchange Commission. The company has yet to determine how many shares it will sell or at what price, but the filing paves the way for a proposed initial public offering of common stock.
Confidential filings are standard for large pre-IPO companies. They let the SEC review documents privately before the company faces public scrutiny. Anthropic has said the move “gives us the option to go public after the SEC completes its review,” stopping short of committing to a firm date or price.
The groundwork started much earlier. Back in December 2025, the Financial Times reported that Anthropic had hired the law firm Wilson Sonsini to begin preparing for a potential listing. Preliminary conversations with investment banks followed. Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, and Morgan Stanley are widely expected to compete for lead underwriting roles.
Anthropic’s valuation has moved fast and in one direction only.
Since its founding in 2021, Anthropic has raised over $23 billion, with its last primary funding round in September 2025 bringing its valuation to $183 billion. That round was already enormous by any historical standard.
Then came the acceleration. In late May 2026, Anthropic announced a $65 billion Series H financing at a $965 billion valuation, led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, and Sequoia Capital. The round pushed Anthropic’s private valuation past OpenAI’s for the first time.
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.
The margin picture is thinner. Anthropic’s projected $559 million operating profit in Q2 represents a roughly 5 percent margin, thin for a company seeking a near-trillion-dollar public valuation. The economics of running frontier AI models at scale are expensive. Compute costs are the main culprit.
Running Claude at scale requires a staggering amount of computing power. Anthropic has been signing major infrastructure deals to keep up.
In October 2025, Anthropic said it planned to use up to one million Google TPUs in an expansion worth tens of billions of dollars. In April 2026, the company followed with a new Google and Broadcom agreement for multiple gigawatts of next-generation TPU capacity beginning in 2027.
In November 2025, Anthropic committed to purchase $30 billion of Azure compute capacity, while NVIDIA and Microsoft committed to invest up to $10 billion and $5 billion respectively in Anthropic.
More recently, it struck an agreement with SpaceX to use available compute at the Colossus 1 data center in Memphis, Tennessee, paying SpaceX $1.25 billion per month through May 2029.
The diversity of supply matters here. Claude now runs across AWS Trainium, Google TPUs, and NVIDIA GPUs. Relying on a single cloud provider would be a real vulnerability for an IPO candidate. Having multiple compute sources gives Anthropic more negotiating leverage and reduces the risk of a single vendor becoming a bottleneck.
The IPO contest between Anthropic and OpenAI has taken on a life of its own.
OpenAI is preparing for a public listing in the fourth quarter of 2026, and executives there are reportedly concerned about being beaten to the public market by Anthropic. Whichever company lists first is likely to capture the largest share of early investor enthusiasm.
OpenAI was valued at $852 billion in late March after closing a record-breaking $122 billion funding round. That made Anthropic’s subsequent $965 billion valuation all the more pointed.
The revenue comparison is close but tilting. OpenAI generated $5.7 billion in revenue during the first quarter of 2026, beating Anthropic by nearly $1 billion for that period, according to The Information. But Anthropic’s growth rate has been steeper, and its enterprise concentration gives it a different risk profile.
OpenAI has roughly 900 million weekly active users, while Anthropic’s monthly active user base sits at around 134 million. Anthropic has fewer users but extracts more revenue per customer, a profile that public market investors in enterprise software tend to reward.
The filing does not settle everything. There are real open questions.
Margins are the obvious one. Anthropic is spending heavily on compute, safety research, and talent. A 5 percent operating margin at a near-trillion-dollar valuation is a hard story to tell. Public investors will want to see a path to durable profitability, not just revenue growth.
The compute dependency is another risk. The central question is not whether Claude is popular. The harder question is whether demand can produce durable margins after the company pays for AWS Trainium, Google TPUs, NVIDIA GPUs, Azure capacity, data centers, power, networking, and safety research.
And then there is the broader moment. 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 entire US IPO market raised just $45 billion in all of 2025. The demand for that much capital, all at once, is itself an open question.
Anthropic is waiting on SEC review before setting a price or a date. The company has not committed publicly to going through with a listing at all. But the filing is the strongest signal yet that it intends to.
The AI industry is watching closely. A successful Anthropic IPO would give it access to public capital markets, make acquisitions easier, and provide a liquidity event for the many investors who have backed it since 2021. It would also send a signal about what the public markets think AI companies are actually worth, not just what private investors believe in a room.
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