Anthropic submitted confidential paperwork for an initial public offering 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 looks to be a historic year for IPOs as artificial intelligence labs vie to fund their expensive research.
Anthropic announced the filing in an unsigned, two-paragraph blog post, noting that the amount of money it is seeking to raise—and at what valuation—has not been set. The company said that the timing of the IPO would “depend on market conditions and other factors.” The announcement comes just days after Anthropic unveiled a $65 billion fundraising round.
The company declined to comment beyond its blog.
Anthropic, led by CEO Dario Amodei, joins a crowded space. OpenAI is rumored to be targeting its own public offering as soon as September. SpaceX, which owns the Elon Musk-founded xAI, confidentially filed its own IPO paperwork in April and published it on May 20. It is now targeting a June 12 stock market debut and seeking a $1.75 trillion valuation, Reuters has reported.
The three companies are racing to secure access to funding that would help pay for the computing resources required to train increasingly capable frontier AI models. Anthropic’s annualized revenue, based on sales from an unspecified time frame last month, is $47 billion, the company said last week. But it spent more money on cloud computing and thousands of staff, leading to losses.
Monday’s filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission allows regulators to give feedback on the lengthy document, which talks about Anthropic’s goals, finances, and challenges. (The company can then make edits based on that feedback.) IPO preparations are complicated, requiring companies to shore up their accounting, tighten various internal policies, and have a clear sales pitch for investors.
The much-anticipated debut could unleash a wave of wealth across San Francisco, where Anthropic is based. Some Anthropic employees previously converted a portion of their shares into cash by privately selling them to investors before the IPO. But more Anthropic employees may cash out or sell larger stakes as part of the IPO process, turning tens or even hundreds of paper millionaires and billionaires into real ones.
The IPO could also be a boon for large shareholders such as Amazon and investors that made some of the first bets on the company, including Skype cofounder Jaan Tallinn.
If all goes well, Anthropic’s IPO could rival that of SpaceX as the largest ever. But Anthropic’s complicated corporate structure and governance, including its status as a public benefit corporation that partly answers to a committee the company calls a Long-Term Benefit Trust, could lead to both delays and a knockdown in valuation.
Anthropic has set itself apart from other AI labs by focusing heavily on courting business customers. Its code-writing model, Claude Code, is widely considered best-in-class.
But the company has faced some setbacks. Earlier this year, US defense secretary Pete Hegseth sanctioned Anthropic under two different government supply-chain laws to remove the company’s Claude AI models from the military and other federal agencies. Hegseth deemed the company’s ethical stances—including its resistance to the unsupervised use of Claude in high-stakes scenarios—a national security threat. Specifically, Anthropic executives have held firm that the government’s desire to potentially unilaterally deploy nascent AI models for tasks such as weapons targeting and mass domestic surveillance is not a use case the company will allow.
The designations threaten to cost Anthropic billions of dollars in sales this year, executives have said. Anthropic has sued to overturn them in ongoing court battles.