The race to IPO is on: Anthropic just filed its confidential S-1 draft.
On Monday morning, the AI juggernaut announced it had turned in its first IPO proposal to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. It’s a major step in the rush toward a public listing, as Anthropic and rival OpenAI race to claim billions of dollars and stake their claim on the AI narrative.
A confidential S-1 filing usually comes about six to nine months before a company actually hits the public markets, though that range can vary widely. OpenAI is also racing to IPO, with Business Insider reporting in mid-May that the ChatGPT-maker was preparing its own confidential prospectus.
It hasn’t been confirmed whether OpenAI has filed its confidential S-1 yet. The company did not immediately respond to Business Insider’s request for comment. Anthropic declined to comment.
The rivals’ IPOs are each widely expected to place the companies at valuations above $1 trillion, marking a seismic shift in the public markets and a landmark in the fast-moving era of AI.
Just last week, Anthropic boosted its valuation to $965 billion in a new funding round. The company — founded by OpenAI defectors in 2021 — has enjoyed a meteoric rise over the past year, largely due to the popularity of its Claude Code product.
Claude Code lets users automate software development and has grown popular for everything from simple web apps to transforming entire companies’ codebases. Though OpenAI’s competitor Codex has notched recent praise, Anthropic’s earlier success in selling the enterprise software drove such intense growth that CEO Dario Amodei said it’s “too hard to handle.”
Anthropic said in May that its run-rate, or the money it projects to make in a year given current demand, had reached $47 billion.
The push for an IPO will reignite discussions around Anthropic’s dealings with the U.S. government. In February, the company entered a standoff with the Pentagon over the possible uses of its AI for surveillance and the piloting of autonomous weapons. Peeved by the company’s stance, the Pentagon declared Anthropic a supply chain risk and ordered defense contractors to cut ties with its tech.
Anthropic’s business is entangled with another prospective IPO juggernaut: SpaceX. Elon Musk’s rocket and AI company is renting $1.25 billion a month of compute to Anthropic, it revealed in its own S-1 filing this May.
Based on that public filing, SpaceX’s IPO is expected this summer. It’s set to be the first of three gigantic listings, a spree that would tie millions of investors’ savings directly to the buzziest names in AI.
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