Anthropic Confidential is filing for what could be the largest IPO ever

Anthropic sent confidentially initial public offering filing on Monday, the first step in what could be a blockbuster debut for the $965 billion company. The filing with US regulators is another start to what looks set to be a historic year for IPOs as AI labs struggle to fund their expensive research.

Anthropic announced the filing in an unsigned two-paragraph blog post, noting that the amount of money it wants 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 disclosed a $65 billion funding round.

The company declined to comment beyond its blog.

Anthropic, led by CEO Dario Amodei, joins a crowded space. OpenAI is rumored to be heading for its own public offering as soon as September. SpaceX, which owns Elon Musk-founded xAI, confidentially filed its own IPO documents in April and published them on May 20. It is now targeting a June 12 stock market debut and is seeking a $1.75 trillion valuation, Reuters reported.

The three companies are racing to secure access to funding that would help pay for the computing resources needed to train increasingly capable frontier AI models. Anthropic’s annual revenue, based on sales from an unspecified period last month, was $47 billion, the company said last week. 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 provide feedback on the lengthy document that talks about Anthropic’s goals, finances and challenges (the company can then make edits based on that feedback). Preparing for an IPO is complex, requiring companies to strengthen their accounting, tighten various internal policies and have a clear business pitch for investors.

The long-awaited debut could unleash a wave of fortune in San Francisco, where Anthropic is based. Some Anthropic employees previously converted some of their stock into cash by selling it privately to investors before the IPO. But more Anthropic employees can cash out or sell larger stakes as part of 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 like Amazon and investors who made some of the company’s early bets, including Skype co-founder Jaan Talin.

If all goes well, Anthropic’s IPO could rival SpaceX’s as the biggest ever. But Anthropic’s complex corporate 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 cause both a delay and a downgrade.

Anthropic differentiates itself from other AI labs by focusing heavily on courting business customers. Its code writing model, Claude Code, is considered best in class.

But the company faced some setbacks. Earlier this year, US 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 believes that the company’s ethical stances—including its opposition to the uncontrolled use of Claude in high-stakes scenarios—are a threat to national security. Specifically, Anthropic executives have argued that the government’s desire to potentially unilaterally deploy nascent AI models for tasks such as weapons targeting and mass home surveillance is not a use case the company will allow.

The labels threaten to cost Anthropic billions of dollars in sales this year, executives said. Anthropic sued to overturn them in ongoing legal battles.