Anthropic is scheduling meetings between prospective investors and company executives ahead of a potential initial public offering later this year, CNBC reported on July 15. Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and JPMorgan Chase are leading the offering.
The AI startup behind the Claude models could hit public markets as soon as October, though timing could change, according to Bloomberg, which first reported the investor meetings. Anthropic declined to comment.
Beating OpenAI to Market
Anthropic confidentially filed its IPO prospectus with the Securities and Exchange Commission last month. OpenAI also filed confidentially with the SEC in June, but has not disclosed additional details. If Anthropic launches first, it would claim a strategic advantage: listing while AI enthusiasm remains high, before a potential market cooldown.
The company closed a $65B funding round at a $965B valuation in May, according to CNBC, pushing it above OpenAI’s $852B valuation for the first time.
The Banking Play
Wall Street’s three largest banks by revenue are involved in the offering, underscoring the scale of the expected listing. The AI spending boom has fueled a resurgence in deal-making profit for Wall Street firms, with investors “clamoring for ways to fund the buildout and invest in or hedge aspects of the theme,” per CNBC.
An Anthropic listing would build on momentum from SpaceX’s blockbuster June IPO and further open public markets to companies at the center of the AI boom, after years in which the industry’s biggest names remained private while raising hundreds of billions.
The Agentic Ecosystem Stake
Anthropic was founded in 2021 by a group of executives and researchers who left OpenAI over concerns about the company’s direction. The company has found early enterprise traction through Claude Code, its coding assistant. Anthropic’s broader ecosystem includes the Model Context Protocol (MCP) standard for agent tool integration and Claude Managed Agents for hosted agent infrastructure.
An IPO would give Anthropic the public equity currency to compete with Google, Microsoft-backed OpenAI, and Meta in the escalating AI infrastructure arms race, where capital requirements are measured in tens of billions per quarter.