Anthropic, the artificial intelligence company behind the Claude family of models, filed a confidential draft registration statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Monday, stepping ahead of rival OpenAI in the race to reach public markets and setting up one of the most consequential Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) in recent corporate history.
The company confirmed the filing on its website, stating it submitted a Form S-1 on June 1, 2026, giving itself the option to proceed with a public listing once the SEC completes its review. No share count or offering price has been set.
The move caught markets by surprise. Anthropic, which was founded in 2021 by former OpenAI researchers, has spent much of the past year closing the gap with its better-known rival before overtaking it. Its latest funding round, closed in late May, raised $65 billion and pushed its valuation to $965 billion, eclipsing OpenAI’s most recent valuation of $852 billion for the first time.
Its annualised revenue run rate recently surpassed $47 billion, up from $10 billion in annual revenue at the end of 2025, driven largely by enterprise adoption of Claude models and the growing commercial traction of Claude Code, the company’s agentic coding assistant.
The filing lands in a crowded IPO season. SpaceX has officially filed its prospectus and is preparing to launch its roadshow this week, targeting a listing at a valuation of roughly $1.75 trillion. OpenAI is also preparing its own confidential filing, with analysts previously expecting it to move first.
Harrison Rolfes, a senior analyst at PitchBook, offered a counterintuitive read on the competitive dynamic: “For OpenAI, the unconventional read is that Anthropic just volunteered to absorb all the disclosure risk first, and OpenAI now has a free option to watch how institutional investors react to audited frontier AI financials before committing to its own price.”
A debut near Anthropic’s current private valuation would place it among the largest companies in the S&P 500 on arrival, a scale that analysts warn could absorb significant liquidity from the broader IPO market. The U.S. IPO market raised $87.5 billion through May 26, its highest year-to-date total since 2021, according to Dealogic, with additional large listings expected in the coming weeks including quantum computing company Quantinuum and mobile marketing platform Liftoff.
Anthropic’s investors include Blackstone, Brookfield, General Catalyst and Singapore’s GIC. The company is structured as a public benefit corporation, with its stated purpose being the responsible development of advanced AI for the long-term benefit of humanity.
