Anthropic filed confidential paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday, taking the first formal step toward a public offering that would put one of the most closely watched AI companies in line for Wall Street. The company said the number of shares it will offer and the stock’s price have not been set.
The filing landed on a day when investors were already watching Anthropic closely because the company has become one of the fastest-growing names in artificial intelligence. It raised $65 billion in its latest funding round at a $965 billion valuation, a level that pushed it past OpenAI’s last valuation of $852 billion in March and sharpened the race between the two companies for both market dominance and a future public listing.
Anthropic said the proposed initial public offering will depend on market conditions and other factors, which means there is still no timetable for when the company might actually go public. Still, the filing gives the company flexibility to move when it wants, after the SEC completes its review. That matters because the market for large AI companies has been moving fast enough that timing can shape both valuation and investor appetite.
The company’s rise has been driven largely by enterprise offerings, especially Claude Code, the coding software that has helped turn Anthropic into a commercial force. It rolled out Claude for Small Business this year and unveiled Claude Opus 4.8 last week, while saying its annual revenue run rate topped $47 billion at the beginning of May, up from $30 billion in April and $9 billion last year. For investors, that kind of growth is the reason the filing drew immediate attention.
But the story is not just about growth. Under Dario Amodei, Anthropic has framed itself as a safety-first company, and that stance has put it at odds with the Trump administration even as it pursues a public offering. President Trump previously threatened to ban the use of Anthropic’s software across government agencies, and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth moved to designate the company a supply chain risk. Anthropic has sued to have that designation removed.
That friction gives the offering an edge that a standard AI listing would not have. Anthropic held back its latest AI model, Claude Mythos Preview, in April over concerns that it was too good at hacking into software, and it has also established a cybersecurity partnership with companies including Amazon, Apple and Microsoft. The company is trying to prove it can be both commercially dominant and cautious enough to govern itself, a balance that will matter as it moves through the SEC review. What remains unknown is not whether Anthropic wants the public market, but when it will be ready to step into it.
