Anthropic is expected to begin marketing its initial public offering in mid-October at the earliest, according to Reuters sources, after filing confidentially with the SEC on June 1 at a private valuation of $965 billion. If the listing completes this fall, it would put a frontier AI lab on public markets for the first time and hand investors a direct stake in the sector’s fastest revenue story.
The race matters because OpenAI, valued at $852 billion in March, is preparing its own confidential filing. Whoever lists first sets the template for how a frontier lab reports financials, and Anthropic has made clear it wants to be the one writing that template. A source familiar with OpenAI’s plans told Reuters in late May that the ChatGPT maker expected to file within weeks. Three months later, Anthropic still holds the lead.
From $380 billion to $965 billion in one quarter
The valuation trajectory is the steepest any large private company has recorded. In February, Anthropic raised $30 billion at a post-money valuation of $380 billion. Three months later it closed a $65 billion Series H at $965 billion, more than doubling its own price while skipping past OpenAI as the most valuable private AI company in the world.
Revenue explains part of the move. The company told prospective investors that second-quarter revenue jumped at least 14-fold year over year to more than $11.5 billion, according to Bloomberg. Its annualized run rate has reached $47 billion, up from roughly $10 billion in all of 2025. Projections circulated to investors put 2028 revenue at $190 billion to $200 billion. Those are extraordinary numbers, and they carry the usual caveat that projections are marketing until audited statements say otherwise.
Product momentum did the rest. Claude Code became the anchor of enterprise adoption, and the April release of Claude Mythos Preview, a model with advanced offensive cybersecurity capabilities, pulled the company into boardroom conversations it had not been part of before. Claude’s consumer standing also improved after a well-publicized clash with the Pentagon, of all things, drove curiosity sign-ups rather than driving customers away.
The Pentagon problem that would not go away
That clash deserves its own accounting. Negotiations between Anthropic and the Department of Defense collapsed earlier this year after the company refused to grant the military broad access to its models. The Pentagon responded by designating Anthropic a supply chain risk and blacklisting its technology from federal agencies. Defense contractors dropped the Claude maker to stay compliant.
Anthropic sued, calling the move unconstitutional retaliation, and in late August a judge found the ban inadequately justified, a key procedural win though the litigation continues. President Trump told CNBC in April that a deal between the company and the DOD was possible. For IPO investors, the dispute cuts both ways. It is a headline risk that persists into the listing window, and it is also evidence that demand for the product is strong enough to survive losing an entire customer category.
A compute bill measured in nine figures a month
Behind the revenue sits a procurement operation of historic scale. Anthropic’s disclosed computing commitments in 2026 now total at least $135 billion, and the deals keep stacking up.
| Counterparty | Deal size | Scope |
|---|---|---|
| Amazon Web Services | $100 billion | Ten-year commitment announced in April |
| Nscale | $45 billion | Capacity at a West Virginia facility |
| Lambda | $35 billion | Six-year deal, data center in Nueces County, Texas |
| Microsoft Azure | $30 billion | Additional capacity commitment |
| Volta Infra Holdings | $10 billion | Nvidia-backed facility in Norway |
| SpaceX | $1.25 billion per month | Compute lease at Colossus 1, Memphis, through May 2029 |
The Lambda deal, announced September 1, shows how tangled the supply chain has become. Nvidia has invested in both Anthropic and Lambda. Nvidia leases the Texas facility from Hut 8, a Bitcoin miner turned data center operator, then Lambda pays Nvidia for access so it can deploy chips and supply compute to Anthropic. Three intermediaries stand between the model and the electrons, and every one of them takes a margin.
Anthropic is also trying to cut Nvidia out of part of the loop. It hired Google TPU founder Amir Salek to build its first in-house AI chips and weighed a $7 billion acquisition of chip startup MatX, according to Business Times sources. Custom silicon is the same playbook OpenAI is running, and both companies are years away from it mattering at scale.
What the market will actually be pricing
A $965 billion entry valuation would place Anthropic in the top tier of the S&P 500 on day one, alongside companies that took decades to get there. Bankers have warned that an offering of this scale could drain liquidity from smaller listings, a real concern in a market that has already absorbed SpaceX’s record debut. SpaceX listed in June at a $1.75 trillion valuation after raising $75 billion, rewriting the record books, and Anthropic’s team has studied that offering closely.
The bull case rests on the revenue curve holding. If enterprise AI spending keeps compounding and Claude Code keeps winning developer mindshare, the multiple looks aggressive but defensible. The bear case writes itself too: the company is burning cash on compute commitments that stretch past 2029, its largest rival is better capitalized in consumer distribution, and the defense dispute adds regulatory risk no comparable listing has carried.
“This gives us the option to go public after the Securities and Exchange Commission completes its review. The proposed initial public offering will depend on market conditions and other factors.”
Anthropic statement, June 1, 2026
Wedbush analyst Dan Ives called the filing the opening of the floodgates for an IPO market that has been dormant for years. Whether the flood is big enough to carry a near-trillion-dollar debut is the question the next six weeks will answer. The roadshow timing in mid-October puts pricing roughly a month before the Fed’s December meeting, with rate-hike odds already climbing on hot inflation prints. Timing a $965 billion listing into that macro is either confident or reckless, and the market will get to say which.
Why it matters beyond one stock
The structural point is bigger than either company. Public markets have had no way to own frontier AI directly. Investors have expressed the trade through Nvidia, Microsoft or a handful of megacap names, none of which is a pure play. An Anthropic listing, and an OpenAI one behind it, changes the plumbing of AI investing the way the SpaceX offering changed access to aerospace.
It also forces disclosure. Private valuations rest on selected metrics shared with chosen investors. A public S-1 will show churn, margins, compute obligations and safety spending in audited detail for the first time. Rivals, regulators and customers will read the same document. However the stock trades on day one, that transparency is the real debut.