Anthropic Confidentially Files for an IPO, Beating OpenAI to the SEC at a $965B Valuation

Anthropic has taken its first formal step toward Wall Street. On Monday, June 1, the maker of the Claude family of AI models said it had submitted a confidential draft registration statement to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for a proposed initial public offering of its common stock. "This gives us the option to go public after the SEC completes its review," the company said, stopping short of committing to a timeline or a price.

The filing lands just days after Anthropic closed a $65 billion Series H round that pushed its post-money valuation to roughly $965 billion — vaulting it past OpenAI, which was last valued at $852 billion after its March raise. That makes Anthropic, at least on paper, the most valuable AI startup in the world, and sets up one of the largest technology debuts the public markets have ever seen.

The confidential submission turns a long-rumored listing into a concrete three-way race. Anthropic, OpenAI and Elon Musk’s SpaceX are now all queued for the public markets within months of one another. SpaceX has set terms to begin trading on June 12 under the ticker SPCX at a valuation near $1.75 trillion, while OpenAI filed its own confidential S-1 in May targeting a September debut. Analysts at Wedbush Securities have described the cluster of filings as a sprint to reach public investors before the AI-funding window narrows.

Anthropic’s rise has been almost vertical. The company raised $13 billion at a $183 billion valuation in its Series F in September 2025, $30 billion at $380 billion in February 2026, and now $65 billion at $965 billion — roughly a fivefold increase in valuation in nine months. Much of that momentum has come from coding tools and enterprise deployments of Claude, which have driven revenue sharply higher.

The economics, however, remain a work in progress. Anthropic spent about 71 cents on compute for every dollar of revenue in the first quarter, a figure it expects to improve to roughly 56 cents this quarter as efficiency gains take hold. Even so, the company cautioned that profitability may not be sustained, citing planned increases in infrastructure spending as it races to secure compute capacity. Those disclosures are the kind of detail public investors will scrutinize once a full prospectus becomes available after the SEC’s review.