Anthropic’s Trillion-Dollar IPO Bet Lands Before OpenAI

Anthropic, the maker of the Claude chatbot, told the world on June 1 that it had quietly handed the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC, the federal markets regulator) a confidential draft of its initial public offering (IPO) paperwork. The filing landed less than a week after the company raised $65 billion at a $965 billion valuation, and it put Anthropic in front of its older rival OpenAI in the race to a Wall Street debut.

Here is the part a careful reader should sit with. The draft is confidential, so the financial pages that would show whether this company is worth almost a trillion dollars stay sealed for now. The money has already moved. The public has not seen the cards.

The Filing That Skips the Numbers

Anthropic PBC, structured as a public benefit corporation, said it submitted a draft registration statement on Form S-1, the standard document a company files before selling shares in the United States. The notice went out under Securities Act Rule 135, a narrow rule that lets a company confirm a filing exists without pitching the stock.

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 language, from Anthropic’s confidential draft S-1 announcement, is deliberately thin. The company added that the number of shares and the price “have not yet been set.” A confidential filing lets a firm start the regulatory clock while keeping revenue, losses, and risk factors private until weeks before any roadshow.

The timing matters as much as the math. OpenAI, the ChatGPT developer, is readying its own confidential filing, and SpaceX has signaled IPO plans of its own. Anthropic moved first, and in a market this crowded with AI ambition, being first to the regulator is its own kind of statement. The same rivalry has played out in product launches, where the cybersecurity tools each lab is shipping have started landing within days of each other.

A $965 Billion Price Tag Set in Private

The valuation behind the filing came from a Series H round of $65 billion, co-led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks and Sequoia Capital, with Capital Group, Coatue, D1 Capital Partners, GIC, ICONIQ and XN among the buyers. Fidelity, Blackstone, Jane Street, Temasek, General Catalyst and Lightspeed Venture Partners round out a backer list that reads like a roll call of the world’s largest pools of private capital.

That round pushed Anthropic past OpenAI for the first time. OpenAI closed a $122 billion raise on March 31 at an $852 billion post-money valuation, co-led by SoftBank. Anthropic now sits roughly $113 billion above it, a reversal that would have sounded absurd a year ago, when Anthropic was the smaller, quieter lab. We covered the moment the numbers flipped in detail when Anthropic leapfrogged OpenAI on valuation.

The two companies are now close enough to compare line by line.

A private valuation is a price a small group of buyers agreed on. A public valuation is a price thousands of strangers test every trading day. The gap between those two prices is the whole story of this IPO.

Where Claude’s Money Comes From

The case for the price rests on Claude’s pull inside large companies. Anthropic has leaned hard into enterprise work: coding, research, workflow automation and back-office tasks that businesses are willing to pay real money for. The company says it crossed a $30 billion revenue run rate, the annualized pace of its current sales, after roughly 80-fold growth in under two years. Independent third-party estimates of Anthropic’s revenue from research firm Sacra put the May figure even higher, near $45 billion annualized.

The customer base tells the same story from a different angle.

• 300,000-plus business customers were using Claude as of late 2025, accounting for the bulk of revenue.
• 1,000-plus customers now spend more than $1 million a year each, roughly double the count from two months earlier.
• Claude Code and Cowork, the company’s developer and workplace tools, are the products pulling much of that enterprise spend.

Krishna Rao, Anthropic’s chief financial officer, framed the demand around stickiness rather than novelty.

“Claude is increasingly indispensable to our growing global community of customers, and we work tirelessly to make tools like Claude Code and Cowork more helpful, more powerful, and more adaptable to their needs,” Rao said.

The Compute Bill Behind the Bet

Revenue is only half the ledger. The other half is what it costs Anthropic to run Claude, and that number is staggering. The company agreed to pay SpaceX $1.25 billion a month for compute capacity starting in May and June, a deal worth around $15 billion a year before volume discounts kick in. That is one supplier among several.

To avoid leaning on any single vendor, Anthropic has stacked commitments across the industry. The spread is wide, and it is expensive.

• Amazon: an expanded deal of up to five gigawatts of capacity, with Anthropic committing more than $100 billion to AWS technologies over ten years and Amazon investing $5 billion now plus up to $20 billion more.
• SpaceX: roughly $15 billion a year in compute capacity at the launch pricing.
• Cloud spread: Anthropic is now a customer of AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure at the same time, paying all three of the major hyperscalers.

That web of deals raises a question public investors will press hard. Amazon’s stake in Anthropic is reported to be worth around $74 billion, close to a tenfold paper return, and the same agreements lock Anthropic into spending heavily on Amazon’s cloud and custom chips. When a backer’s investment grows because the company it funded buys more of its services, the money starts to look circular. The chip relationships have already reshuffled the field, as seen when a stalled OpenAI custom-chip effort opened a door for Anthropic.

What the Public Market Will Demand

A confidential filing buys quiet, but only for a while. Once the S-1 goes public, Anthropic will have to show the gap between that $30 billion run rate and its infrastructure spending. Reported projections point to roughly $70 billion in revenue and about $17 billion in cash flow by 2028, with gross margins climbing from near 50% in 2025 toward 77%, but the same projections show the company carrying an estimated $80 billion in cloud costs through 2029 and not expecting to stop burning cash until 2027.

Sentiment outside the boardroom is another headwind. A March NBC News survey found 57% of registered voters believe the risks of AI outweigh the benefits, and opposition to data centers has hardened, with an estimated $156 billion in projects cancelled or delayed during 2025. Anthropic, like OpenAI’s own funding announcement made clear, is building physical infrastructure at a scale that now collides with local politics.

If the eventual S-1 shows revenue growth outrunning the compute bill, the $965 billion price looks like a floor and the listing prices into a hungry market. If it shows losses widening faster than sales, the first public valuation of a frontier AI lab becomes the moment the whole sector gets repriced in daylight.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I Buy Anthropic Stock Right Now?

No. Anthropic has only submitted a confidential draft registration to the SEC, and it has not set a share count, a price, or a listing date. There is no public stock to buy until the company completes the SEC review and formally launches an offering.

When Will Anthropic Go Public?

No firm date exists. The company says any IPO depends on SEC review and market conditions. Reporting around the filing has pointed to a possible debut as soon as later this year, but that timing is not guaranteed.

How Much Is Anthropic Worth?

Anthropic was valued at $965 billion in its $65 billion Series H round in late May 2026, which moved it past OpenAI’s $852 billion valuation. A public listing would let the open market set its own price for the first time.

Is Anthropic Profitable?

Not yet. Reported projections suggest the company will keep burning cash until at least 2027, weighed down by tens of billions in annual cloud and compute commitments, even as revenue grows quickly.

Did Anthropic File Before OpenAI?

Yes. Anthropic submitted its confidential draft S-1 on June 1, ahead of OpenAI, which is preparing a confidential filing of its own. SpaceX has also signaled IPO plans.

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and is not investment advice. Securities and pre-IPO valuations carry significant risk, and figures here reflect company statements and third-party estimates accurate as of publication. Consult a qualified financial professional before making any investment decision.