Anthropic submitted a confidential draft registration statement on Form S-1 to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday, setting up what could become the largest AI company IPO in history. The Claude developer, now valued at $965 billion after its $65 billion Series H round, has overtaken OpenAI as the world’s most valuable startup.
“This gives us the option to go public after the SEC completes its review,” the company wrote in a blog post. “The proposed initial public offering will depend on market conditions and other factors.” The number of shares and price have not been set.
The Numbers Behind the Filing
The financial trajectory backing this filing is steep. Anthropic’s revenue run rate reached $47 billion in May, up from $10 billion in annual revenue last year, according to CNBC. The company expects to post $10.9 billion in Q2 2026 revenue, more than doubling from Q1, and is on pace for its first profitable quarter, Fortune reported. Anthropic has told investors its annualized run rate will surpass $50 billion by the end of July.
The growth came despite the ongoing Pentagon blacklisting that barred defense contractors from using Anthropic’s models earlier this year. Private sector adoption accelerated anyway: more businesses adopted Claude for coding and enterprise workflows, and the Claude app hit No. 1 on Apple’s U.S. free app chart in late February, per CNBC.
Racing OpenAI to the Public Market
The filing puts Anthropic ahead of OpenAI in the IPO race. OpenAI, valued at $852 billion after its March funding round, is preparing its own confidential filing and targeting a fall debut, Fortune reported. SpaceX, which has a $1.25 billion per month data center deal with Anthropic running through May 2029, plans its own IPO on June 12.
A confidential filing does not lock Anthropic into a timeline. The official prospectus must reach investors at least 15 days before a roadshow begins. SpaceX filed confidentially on April 1 and disclosed its public prospectus on May 20, according to CNBC. Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, and Morgan Stanley are expected to be under consideration for key roles on both the Anthropic and OpenAI listings, per Fortune.
What This Means for Claude’s Agent Ecosystem
Because the filing is confidential, the detailed financials, risk factors, and executive compensation that typically appear in an S-1 remain hidden for now. Those details will become public before any roadshow begins.
For the thousands of agent frameworks, API integrations, and enterprise platforms built on Claude, the IPO introduces new variables. Public companies face quarterly earnings pressure that can drive pricing changes, API rate adjustments, and strategic pivots toward higher-margin customers. Anthropic’s current trajectory, an 80-fold increase in annualized revenue with a path to profitability, suggests the company has pricing power. Whether that power gets exercised at the expense of smaller developers and agent builders will become clearer once the full S-1 lands.
The filing also raises a structural question: with Anthropic and OpenAI both heading toward public markets, the two companies powering most of the world’s agent infrastructure will soon be subject to Wall Street’s quarterly cadence. Agent builders dependent on either vendor’s models should be watching the prospectuses closely for any signals about API pricing commitments, rate limit policies, and enterprise contract terms.