Anthropic Confidentially Files for IPO, Eyes Public Listing Ahead of OpenAI

Anthropic, the developer of the Claude chatbot family, has confidentially submitted draft registration documents to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for a proposed initial public offering. The filing follows a $65 billion funding round that valued the company at $965 billion, surpassing OpenAI's reported $852 billion valuation from March. Reports indicate the IPO could raise more than $60 billion, though the number of shares and price range remain undetermined. Anthropic's rapid growth is driven by enterprise demand for its coding tool Claude Code, which has reached a $2.5 billion annualized revenue run rate, while total company ARR exceeded $47 billion in early May 2026, up from $30 billion in April and $9 billion a year earlier. The company projects Claude could generate $70 billion in sales by 2028.

This filing represents the clearest signal yet of the capital-compression arc sweeping frontier AI labs. Anthropic is moving to lock in public-market capital at a time when training and inference costs are escalating dramatically — Google alone plans $185 billion in capex this year — and the hyperscaler-distribution moat increasingly determines which model provider survives. By going public, Anthropic gains a permanent capital base to fund compute procurement and data-center buildout, including its previously announced $50 billion U.S. data-center commitment, and offers investors a pure-play bet on enterprise AI that is distinct from OpenAI's broader consumer-facing portfolio. The IPO also updates the long-running Open Debate about when and how frontier labs would exit private markets, and whether the hyperscaler-sponsored financing model ($13B+ from Amazon, strategic investments from Alphabet, Microsoft, NVIDIA) would be replaced by public ownership.

For investors and industry observers, the key metric to watch is the revenue multiple: Anthropic's projected valuation of roughly 5x forward 2028 sales mirrors OpenAI's multiple, and sits below Meta's 6x and Palantir's 10x at IPO. This suggests the market is pricing frontier model risk — the possibility that a new entrant or open-weight competitor compresses margins — even at the top of the capital cycle. The bottom line: a successful Anthropic IPO would validate enterprise AI as a standalone public-market category and set a benchmark for every other private lab evaluating its own listing timeline.