Anthropic Confidentially Files for IPO, Beating OpenAI to Wall Street

Anthropic Confidentially Files for IPO, Beating OpenAI to Wall Street

Anthropic confidentially filed a draft S-1 with the SEC on June 1, 2026, taking the first real step toward becoming a public company. The filing came days after Anthropic closed a $65 billion funding round that pushed its valuation to $965 billion, and it put the Claude maker ahead of rival OpenAI in the race to Wall Street. No share count or price has been set. Whether the IPO actually happens still depends on regulators and the market.

What Did Anthropic Actually File?

Anthropic submitted a draft registration statement on Form S-1 to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, but kept it confidential, meaning the public can't see it yet. In its own announcement, the company kept things short: "This gives us the option to go public after the SEC completes its review. The proposed initial public offering will depend on market conditions and other factors."

That's it. No number of shares. No price range. No exchange listed yet. The filing was published under Rule 135 of the Securities Act of 1933, a rule that lets companies announce they've filed without it counting as an offer to sell stock. So this isn't Anthropic selling shares this week. It's Anthropic starting the clock on a process that could take months.

What Does a Confidential IPO Filing Actually Mean?

A confidential IPO filing lets a company begin SEC review of its paperwork without showing its financials, risks, or internal details to the public or competitors. Anthropic gets to work through the SEC's questions in private first.

If Anthropic decides to move forward, the next step is a public S-1. That document will include audited financials, legal risk factors, and a breakdown of who actually controls the company's voting power, the kind of detail investors need before a roadshow and pricing. PitchBook analyst Harrison Rolfes put it plainly in a note to CNBC: "Anthropic filing a confidential S-1 starts the clock on what will be the most scrutinized public offering in tech history." He added that the number everyone should actually be watching isn't the $965 billion valuation or the headline revenue figure. It's gross margin.

How Did Anthropic Get to a $965 Billion Valuation?

Anthropic's valuation jumped from $380 billion to $965 billion in about three months, one of the fastest climbs to a near-trillion-dollar price tag any private company has ever seen. Here's the path:

• Series A (2021): $124 million raised
• Series B (April 2022): $580 million raised, roughly $4 billion valuation
• Series C (May 2023): $450 million raised
• Series E (March 2025): $3.5 billion raised, $61.5 billion post-money
• Series F (September 2025): $13 billion raised, $183 billion post-money
• Series G (February 2026): $30 billion raised, $380 billion post-money
• Series H (May 2026): $65 billion raised, $965 billion post-money, co-led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, Sequoia Capital, Capital Group, Coatue, and D1 Capital Partners

That last jump is the one that matters here. Going from $380 billion to $965 billion in three months means Anthropic now sits above OpenAI's last reported valuation of $852 billion from March 2026. If Anthropic actually lists anywhere near that number, it would land among the largest IPOs ever attempted by a company that doesn't yet have public financials.

Is Anthropic Racing OpenAI to Go Public?

Yes, even if both companies are careful not to call it that. Anthropic filed first on June 1. OpenAI followed exactly a week later, on June 8, with its own confidential S-1, and OpenAI's announcement read almost like it knew people would ask: "We recently submitted a confidential S-1. We expect it to leak so we're just announcing it." OpenAI said it hasn't picked a timeline, noting that "it may be a while because there are things we want to do that are likely easier as a private company."

Sam Altman, OpenAI's CEO, pushed back on the framing directly on CNBC the same day Anthropic's news broke: "I think there is a race to deliver the best technology, build the best business, but you know, going public is a financing event, and I don't think that's one that we're focused on the timing of." Whatever the official line, PitchBook's Rolfes saw it differently: "For OpenAI, the conventional read is that Anthropic just seized the narrative advantage by filing first."

There's a third player that's already past the filing stage. Elon Musk's SpaceX, which folded in his AI company xAI earlier this year, priced its own IPO at $135 a share and started trading on Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX on June 12. The stock jumped 19% on day one, closing near $161 and pushing SpaceX's market cap above $2 trillion, making it the largest IPO in history and putting Musk on paper as the world's first trillionaire. Wedbush Securities analysts called the moment "an opening of the floodgates for the IPO market, which has been relatively dormant for a few years," adding that the filings from Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX have "turned into a race to reach public markets over the coming months."

What Do Anthropic's Revenue Numbers Actually Show?

Anthropic's annual revenue run rate hit roughly $47 billion at the end of May 2026, up from $30 billion in April and about $9 billion a year earlier. That's a fast climb by any standard, and it's the figure most often cited to justify the company's valuation.

It's worth being careful with "run rate" as a number, though. Reuters Breakingviews has pointed out that AI companies, including Anthropic, sometimes count cloud reseller revenue on a gross basis, meaning the full amount an end customer pays gets booked as revenue even when a chunk of it gets paid back out to a partner. That can inflate the headline figure compared to a stricter, net accounting method. None of this means the growth isn't real. It just means the $47 billion number deserves a little skepticism until a public S-1 shows the underlying math.

What's driving that growth is easier to pin down. Claude Code, Anthropic's coding tool, became a favorite among developers fast enough that fintech company Ramp reported in May 2026 that more of its business customers were using Anthropic than OpenAI for the first time. Anthropic also leaned hard into infrastructure to support that growth, committing more than $100 billion to AWS for training and running Claude, and signing a deal to pay SpaceX's Colossus 1 data center in Memphis $1.25 billion a month through May 2029 for compute capacity.

Why Does This IPO Season Matter for AI?

This is the first real test of whether the valuations the AI industry has been throwing around can survive contact with public markets and audited numbers. The IPO market has come back strong this year. Companies raised $87.5 billion globally through May 26, 2026, the highest year-to-date total since 2021, according to Dealogic. SpaceX's debut gave the first concrete data point: investors showed up, the stock popped, and the company is now worth more than $2 trillion on paper, even though it lost nearly $5 billion in 2025 and some analysts, including Morningstar, called the valuation overstretched.

Rolfes framed the stakes for the broader window bluntly: "The 2026 window either becomes the most consequential IPO cycle since the dot-com era or the most expensive lesson in narrative-versus-fundamentals that public markets have ever taught." For Anthropic specifically, going public would mean the first real, audited look at its financials, something that's been impossible to get from a private company burning cash to build out compute.

For everyday Claude users, none of this changes anything right away. Subscriptions, the API, and the product roadmap stay the same regardless of what happens on Wall Street. But if Anthropic does list later this year, expect a lot more public scrutiny of exactly how the company makes money, and exactly how much it costs to run Claude at scale.

What Happens Next

Anthropic hasn't said when, or if, it will actually go public. The next concrete signal will be a public S-1 filing, which has to happen before any roadshow. Analysts at outlets like Bloomberg have floated a debut as soon as fall 2026, but that's a guess based on typical IPO timelines, not a date Anthropic has confirmed. OpenAI is working through the same process on a similar clock. Whichever company lists first, SpaceX's strong debut gives both of them a real answer to the question that mattered most going in: is there still an appetite for AI at this scale.