The AI race is turning into an IPO race, and Anthropic has taken the lead on both counts.
On Monday, the company behind Claude announced that it had filed a confidential prospectus with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Known as an S-1 form, companies are legally required to submit the document for federal review before entering the stock market with an initial public offering, or IPO.
“The proposed initial public offering will depend on market conditions and other factors,” Anthropic wrote in its announcement.
If recent numbers are any indication, though, Anthropic is on track for a historically massive IPO. The company announced last week that it had raised $65 billion in its latest funding round, landing its post-money valuation at $965 billion. That means it’s officially surpassed the valuation of its biggest competitor, OpenAI, the company that sparked the AI boom with the release of ChatGPT in late 2022 and is currently valued at around $730 billion.
Anthropic was founded by former OpenAI employees who left the company following disagreements over how the technology should be developed. Since then, a steady trickle of ex-OpenAI researchers have left the company for Anthropic, which has positioned itself as the most responsible leader in an industry that has played fast and loose with safety precautions. Last month, a company executive joined Pope Leo XIV for the latter’s delivery of his “Magnifica Humanitas” encyclical, further bolstering its humanitarian reputation.
Until very recently, Anthropic was an underdog in the AI race. But its visibility, appeal, and userbase have grown following an ad campaign for Super Bowl LX, which highlighted its commitment to keeping Claude ad-free, and its debate with the federal government over the use of its technology in military systems. Beyond those big PR wins, Anthropic’s AI tools have also long been a favorite among web developers.
News of Anthropic’s IPO filing marks the beginning of what could become an unprecedentedly huge injection of capital into the AI sector. OpenAI is also expected to file its own prospectus as soon as this month, though no official date has yet been announced. Each company’s projected post-IPO valuation is slated to be many orders of magnitude larger than the hitherto largest IPO in history: Saudi Aramco’s in 2019, at a relatively paltry $25.6 billion.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX, parent company of Musk’s xAI, is also expected to go public this year, at the even more staggering projected valuation of at least $1.25 trillion. That could make Musk, who owns about 50% of SpaceX stock, the world’s first trillionaire.
