Anthropic announced the filing in an unsigned, two-paragraph blog post, saying how much money it intends to raise — and at what valuation — has not been determined. The company said the timing of the IPO “will 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.
Led by CEO Dario Amodei, Anthropic joins a crowded field. OpenAI is rumored to be targeting its public offering by September. SpaceX, which owns XAI, founded by Elon Musk, filed its IPO documents confidentially in April and published it on May 20. It is now aiming for a stock market debut on June 12 and is seeking a valuation of $1.75 trillion, Reuters reported.
The three companies are competing to secure access to funding that will help pay for the computing resources needed to train increasingly capable frontier AI models. The company said last week that Anthropic has annual revenue of $47 billion, based on sales from an unspecified time frame last month. But it spent more money on cloud computing and thousands of employees, leading to losses.
Monday’s filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission allows regulators to respond to the lengthy document, which talks about Anthropic’s goals, finances and challenges. (The company may make edits based on that feedback.) Preparing for an IPO is complex, requiring companies to strengthen their accounting, tighten various internal policies, and make a clear sales pitch to investors.
This highly anticipated opening could bring a wave of wealth throughout San Francisco, where Anthropic is located. Some Anthropic employees had previously converted a portion of their shares into cash before the IPO by selling a portion of their shares to private investors. But more anthropogenic employees could cash out or sell large 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 big shareholders like Amazon and investors who made the first bets on the company, including Skype co-founder Jaan Talin.
If all goes well, Anthropic’s IPO could rival SpaceX’s, which would be the biggest IPO ever. But Anthropic’s complex 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 cause both a delay and a decline in valuation.
Anthropic has differentiated itself from other AI labs by focusing heavily on attracting business clients. Its code-writing model, Cloud Code, is widely considered best-in-class.
But the company has faced some setbacks. Earlier this year, U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth sanctioned Anthropic under two separate government supply-chain laws to remove the company’s cloud AI models from the military and other federal agencies. Hegseth considered the company’s ethical stance – including its resistance to unsafe use of the cloud in high-risk scenarios – a national security threat. In particular, Anthropic officials have firmly stated that the government’s desire to potentially unilaterally deploy nascent AI models for tasks like weapons targeting and large-scale domestic surveillance is not a use case the company would allow.
Executives have said these designations threaten to cost Anthropic billions of dollars in sales this year. Anthropic has sued to overturn them in ongoing court battles.
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