Anthropic filed confidential paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday, taking the first formal step toward a public listing as the company races OpenAI to the market.
The filing does not yet say how many shares Anthropic will offer or at what price, and the company said the timing of any initial public offering will depend on market conditions and other factors. For now, the move gives the startup a path to go public once the SEC finishes its review, even as the business enters that process with unusual momentum: Anthropic said it raised $65 billion in its latest funding round at a $965 billion valuation, after reporting a $47 billion annual revenue run rate at the beginning of May.
That scale helps explain why investors are watching the company so closely. OpenAI was last valued at $852 billion in March, and the two startups have become the most closely watched names in the push to bring artificial intelligence tools from private capital into the public markets. Anthropic’s rise has been driven in large part by its enterprise offerings, especially Claude Code, the coding software that has become one of the company’s most important products. It also rolled out Claude for Small Business this year and unveiled Claude Opus 4.8 last week, adding to a product lineup that is now central to its valuation story.
But the same safety-first posture that has distinguished Anthropic is also creating friction. Dario Amodei has framed the company as one that will not let the Pentagon use its software for mass surveillance of Americans or to operate fully autonomous weapons, a position that previously drew a threat from President Trump to ban Anthropic’s software across government agencies. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth later moved to designate the company a supply chain risk, and Anthropic has sued to have that designation removed. The clash leaves the company balancing a public-market debut against a political fight that has already reached the highest levels of the administration.
The next milestone is the SEC review, followed by a public registration filing only if Anthropic decides to press ahead. The unanswered question is not whether the company has enough scale to go public; it clearly does. It is whether the market window, and the politics around its AI stance, will let it do so on Anthropic’s terms.
