On June 1, 2026, Claude-maker Anthropic confidentially submitted its draft S-1 to the SEC, opening the door to what could be the most consequential technology IPO of this generation.
The filing encompasses a company that closed its most recent funding round just days earlier, raising $65 billion at a post-money valuation of $965 billion. That figure makes Anthropic momentarily more valuable than its better-known rival OpenAI, a reversal that would have seemed implausible as recently as a year ago.
Anthropic was founded in 2021 by former OpenAI executives Dario and Daniela Amodei. Its annualized revenue run rate reached approximately $47 billion by May 2026, driven primarily by sales of its Claude model to enterprise clients for coding, research, and workflow automation tasks. That growth trajectory has outpaced nearly every comparable company in the current Silicon Valley cohort, including OpenAI, which analysts say made slower inroads into enterprise software.
Around the same time, SpaceX formally announced plans for a $75 billion IPO at a $1.75 trillion valuation, while OpenAI is expected to file its own confidential S-1 in the coming weeks. All three companies remain unprofitable, a detail that has sharpened the debate over whether the current AI investment cycle resembles a broader technology bubble.
Scott Stevens, chief executive of New York advisory firm Gray Peak Financial, noted that Anthropic's valuation increase from approximately $380 billion in February to $965 billion by late May represents one of the steepest escalations in modern capital markets. "OpenAI was the poster child for growth and innovation, and now Anthropic has raised capital at a higher valuation in a matter of 12 to 14 months," he said.
Analyst Gil Luria of DA Davidson suggested the IPO race is partly about setting the financial reporting framework for the industry. "OpenAI and Anthropic are in a race to go public before capital runs out," Luria said. "Whichever company establishes the reporting framework first will define how frontier models are measured by public markets."
A listing at near-trillion-dollar valuation would place Anthropic among the largest components of the S&P 500 if admitted, with the potential to shift benchmark-index weights and redirect institutional capital flows. The deal also arrives at a moment when the U.S. IPO market has been sluggish for several years, and investors are still weighing the long-term revenue potential of generative AI against the capital intensity and risk associated with computing infrastructure.
Anthropic's confidential filing means specific terms, offering size, and valuation targets have not been disclosed publicly. Regulators and underwriters will scrutinize revenue recognition, model depreciation schedules, and competitive risk disclosures closely when a public filing is eventually released.
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