Anthropic Files for a Possible Trillion-Dollar IPO

Anthropic has taken the first formal step toward Wall Street. On June 1 the company confirmed it had confidentially submitted a draft S-1 to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the paperwork that precedes an initial public offering. CNBC and NPR both reported the filing, which arrives on the back of a $65 billion funding round that valued the maker of Claude at roughly $965 billion.

That figure is the part worth sitting with. It puts Anthropic above OpenAI, valued at $852 billion in late March, and within reach of a number almost no private company has touched. As Fortune noted, a debut north of a trillion dollars now looks like the base case rather than the optimistic one, assuming public markets play along.

What the filing actually commits to

Less than the headlines suggest. A confidential submission lets a company begin the SEC review process in private, and it does not lock in a date, a share count, or a price. Anthropic said all three remain unset. Under the rules, its prospectus only has to reach investors at least 15 days before any roadshow begins, so the company keeps a wide berth on timing. A listing later in 2026 is possible, but nothing in the paperwork makes it certain.

The growth behind the valuation is genuine. Anthropic said in May that its revenue run rate had reached $47 billion, up from $10 billion in annual revenue a year earlier. That is the kind of curve that lets a company argue for a number like $965 billion with a straight face. Whether public investors, who tend to ask harder questions about margins and cash burn than late-stage private backers do, accept the same math is the open question.

The first real test of AI's private valuations

An IPO does something the private market never forces. It puts a daily, public price on a company. For three years the leading AI labs have raised enormous sums at valuations set by a small circle of investors. Anthropic going public would hand that judgment to everyone, and the result will be read as a verdict on the whole sector, not just one firm.

It also lands amid a broader rush of AI money. We recently covered SoftBank's pledge to spend up to 75 billion euros on French data centers and Cognition's $1 billion raise for its Devin coding agent. Anthropic's filing is the same impulse at a different scale, and it carries more weight because a public listing cannot be quietly walked back the way a private round can.

For now the company has said little beyond confirming the paperwork exists. That restraint is itself telling. The next document that matters is the full prospectus, which will show, for the first time, what Anthropic's books look like under the light that public markets demand.