Anthropic PBC has confidentially submitted draft paperwork for a public listing, potentially leapfrogging longtime rival OpenAI in the race toward a Wall Street debut as soon as this fall.
“The number of shares to be offered and the price have not yet been set,” the company said in a blog post Monday.
Anthropic, once viewed as an underdog to OpenAI, has vaulted ahead of the ChatGPT maker in recent months on multiple fronts. The Claude developer recently raised $65 billion in a funding round at a $965 billion valuation, including the investment, eclipsing OpenAI’s value for the first time. Anthropic’s advances in coding and cybersecurity capabilities have rattled markets and also enticed new business customers.
With the filing on Monday, Anthropic is poised to potentially beat OpenAI to the public market, setting itself up to attract more attention and capital from a greater pool of investors. OpenAI itself was said to be preparing its own confidential filing for an initial public offering in the coming weeks and was targeting a public debut sometime in the fall, Bloomberg reported in May.
Anthropic and rival OpenAI have spent much of the past year one-upping each other with a flurry of AI model releases aimed at streamlining a wider range of professional tasks — from coding to financial services to healthcare — with the goal of courting more business customers and justifying their lofty valuations.
While Anthropic has made headlines recently for experiencing an 80-fold increase in annualized revenue, OpenAI has been rethinking its product lineup and shuffling leadership, as well as confronting new doubts about its growth following a report that it missed certain internal revenue and user targets. In response, OpenAI Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar previously told Bloomberg the company is meeting its objectives and seeing a “vertical wall of demand” for its products.
Anthropic is also facing some uncertainties. The company is currently locked in a legal battle with the US government after the Pentagon declared it a supply-chain risk, a designation typically reserved for foreign adversaries. Anthropic has said the Trump administration’s move could jeopardize billions of dollars in revenue.
The company expects to post $10.9 billion in revenue for the second quarter, more than doubling from the prior three-month period, Bloomberg News has reported. Anthropic is also on pace for its first profitable quarter.
The company has told investors that its annualized run rate revenue will surpass $50 billion by the end of next month, people familiar with the matter said. Anthropic’s run rate, a metric that projects full-year revenue based on sales from a shorter period, was $4 billion in July of last year.
Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceX are all moving ahead with listing plans to open a powerful channel for potential fundraising. While funding in the private market has grown dramatically, a public listing gives the companies access to the widest possible range of investors. It also gives early backers and employees the ability to more easily monetize their stakes.
Goldman Sachs Group Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Morgan Stanley are expected to be under consideration for key roles on Anthropic and OpenAI’s listings, people familiar with the matter have said.
