Anthropic posted as private initial public offering papers on Monday, the first step in what could be a blockbuster debut for the $965 billion company. The filing with US regulators is another entry in what appears to be a historic year for IPOs as artificial intelligence labs scramble to fund their expensive research.
Anthropic announced the filing in an unsigned, two-part blog post, noting that the amount of money it wants to raise—and by what measure—has not been set. The company said the timing of the IPO “will depend on market conditions and other factors.” The announcement comes days after Anthropic launched a $65 billion fundraising round.
The company declined to comment beyond its blog.
Anthropic, led by CEO Dario Amodei, joins a crowded field. OpenAI is rumored to focus on its public offering as soon as September. SpaceX, which owns xAI founded by Elon Musk, secretly filed its IPO documents in April and published them on May 20. It is now looking at the start of the stock market on June 12 and is seeking a valuation of 1.75 trillion, reports Reuters.
The three companies are in the running for funding that could help pay for the computing resources needed to train powerful frontier AI models. Anthropic’s annual revenue, based on sales for an undisclosed period last month, is $47 billion, the company said last week. But it spent a lot of money on cloud computing and thousands of employees, leading to losses.
Monday’s filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission allows regulators to provide feedback in a lengthy document, which addresses Anthropic’s goals, finances, and challenges. (The company is planning based on that answer.) IPO preparations are complex, requiring companies to strengthen their accounting, enforce various internal policies, and have a clear sales pitch to investors.
The highly anticipated startup could unleash a wave of wealth across San Francisco, where Anthropic is based. Some Anthropic employees had previously converted part of their shares into cash by selling them privately to investors before the IPO. But many Anthropic employees may cash out or sell large stakes as part of the IPO process, turning tens or hundreds of paper millionaires and billionaires into real ones.
The IPO could also be a boon for big shareholders like Amazon and investors who made some of the first bets on the company, including Skype founder Jaan Tallinn.
If all goes well, Anthropic’s IPO could rival SpaceX’s as the biggest ever. But Anthropic’s complex corporate structure and governance, including its status as a public benefit corporation that answers in part to a committee the company calls a Long-Term Benefit Trust, could lead to both delays and deregulation.
Anthropic has set itself apart from other AI labs by focusing more on appealing to business customers. Its coding model, Claude Code, is widely considered best in class.
But the company has faced setbacks. Earlier this year, US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth authorized Anthropic under two separate government procurement rules to remove the company’s Claude AI models from the military and other government agencies. Hegseth considered the company’s behavior—including resistance to Claude’s unsupervised use in critical situations—as a national security threat. In particular, Anthropic executives are adamant that the government’s desire to independently use emerging AI models to perform tasks such as weapons targeting and mass home surveillance is not a case the company will condone.
These positions threaten to cost Anthropic billions of dollars in sales this year, executives said. Anthropic sued them seeking an overturn in the ongoing courts.
