Anthropic submissive confidential paperwork for an IPO on Monday, the first step in what could be a successful debut for the $965 billion company. The filing with US regulators is another entry in what appears to be a historic year for IPOs as artificial intelligence laboratories compete to finance their expensive research.
Anthropic announced the filing in an unsigned two-paragraph document blog postnoting that the amount of money it seeks to raise – and at what valuation – has not been set. The company said the timing of the IPO would “depend on market conditions and other factors.” This announcement comes just days after Anthropic unveiled a 65 billion dollars 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 aiming for its own public offering as early as September. xAI owner SpaceX, founded by Elon Musk, confidentially filed its own IPO documents in April and released them on May 20. The company is now targeting a June 12 IPO and is seeking a valuation of $1.75 trillion. Reuters reported.
The three companies are fighting for access to funding that would help fund the computing resources needed to train increasingly capable cutting-edge AI models. Anthropic’s annualized revenue, based on sales over an unspecified period last month, is $47 billion, the company announced last week. But it spent more money on cloud computing and hiring thousands of employees, leading to losses.
Monday’s filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission allows regulators to provide input on the lengthy document, which talks about Anthropic’s goals, finances and challenges. (The company can then make changes based on that feedback.) IPO preparations are complicated, requiring companies to consolidate their accounting, tighten various internal policies and present a clear sales pitch to investors.
The highly anticipated debut could spark a wave of wealth in San Francisco, where Anthropic is based. Some Anthropic employees previously converted some of their shares into cash by selling them privately to investors before the IPO. But more Anthropic employees can cash out or sell larger stakes in the IPO process, turning dozens or even hundreds of paper millionaires and billionaires into real ones.
The IPO could also be a boon for big shareholders such as Amazon and investors who made some of the early bets on the company, including Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn.
If all goes well, Anthropic’s IPO could rival SpaceX’s and become the largest ever. But Anthropic’s complex structure and governance, including its status as a public benefit corporation that answers in part to a committee the company calls the Long-Term Benefit Trust, could lead to both delays and a decline in valuation.
Anthropic has distinguished itself from other AI labs by focusing heavily on courting enterprise customers. His code writing model, Claude Code, is widely considered best in class.
But the company faced some setbacks. Earlier this year, U.S. 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 viewed the company’s ethical positions, including its resistance to unsupervised use of Claude in high-stakes scenarios, as a threat to national security. Specifically, Anthropic executives have maintained that the government’s desire to potentially unilaterally deploy nascent AI models for tasks like 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, the leaders said. Anthropic filed a lawsuit to oust them ongoing legal battles.
