Anthropic Beats OpenAI to a Confidential IPO Filing at $965 Billion

Anthropic confidentially submitted a draft S-1 to the Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday, the company said in a blog post, putting it ahead of rival OpenAI in the race to take a frontier AI lab public. The filing follows a $65 billion funding round closed last week that valued Anthropic at $965 billion, past the $852 billion OpenAI carried from its March raise.

Filing first is mostly a claim on capital and narrative. A confidential draft lets Anthropic start the SEC's review clock without disclosing the financials and risk factors a public prospectus carries, so the figures that would settle whether its lead over OpenAI is durable or a two-month artifact of when each company last raised stay private until the fall.

The confidential route and the fall calendar

A confidential draft requires a public S-1 to reach investors at least 15 days before any roadshow, so Monday's filing starts a clock without committing to a date. Anthropic said the offering "will depend on market conditions and other factors," and that "the number of shares to be offered and the price have not yet been set." The sequence around it is tight. SpaceX filed confidentially on April 1, disclosed its prospectus on May 20, and plans to debut June 12 at a valuation near $1.75 trillion, according to CNBC. OpenAI is targeting September and was preparing its own confidential filing as of mid-May, Business Insider reported. Anthropic could list in October, per Forbes.

The three are competing for the same finite pool of investor cash. "It's very hard to care about anything other than the $3 trillion potential IPOs," Sam Lessin, a partner at Slow Ventures, told CNBC. NBC News drew the 2019 parallel: Lyft went public before Uber and traded better afterward, while Uber finished its first day below its IPO price. "Many analysts believe whichever company makes it to the markets first will perform better in the funding race," NBC reported, because Anthropic and OpenAI will each seek tens of billions of dollars in short succession.

$965 billion against a March number

Anthropic's valuation has climbed from $380 billion in February to $965 billion late last week, a 2.5-fold move in roughly three and a half months. Its run-rate revenue, an annualized figure the company calculates by multiplying a recent month by 12, reached $47 billion in May, up from about $9 billion at the end of 2025. Anthropic also expects its first profitable quarter in the three months ending June 30, with operating profit of $559 million on $10.9 billion in revenue, Engadget reported.

OpenAI's $852 billion comes from a $122 billion round in March, two months before Anthropic's, so the ranking sets a late-May mark against a late-March one. As Gizmodo put it, the comparison is "a little like when a sports team overtakes a rival in league rankings having played one more game than the other." By April, both companies were charging enterprise customers API-based rates for their coding agents, Claude Code and Codex, after years of discounted seats, the developer Simon Willison documented.

The $1.25 billion-a-month compute bill

The figures investors would be pricing are still self-reported. Anthropic's run-rate is unaudited, and the Wall Street Journal, reviewing the claimed profitable quarter, noted that "it is unclear what accounting methods Anthropic has used to book revenue and costs," and that the company "might not remain profitable for the full year" given its computing needs. Those needs are contractual and large. SpaceX's prospectus discloses that Anthropic agreed to pay $1.25 billion a month for compute capacity at the Colossus data centers through May 2029, capacity Anthropic said would let it "increase our usage limits for Claude Code and the Claude API." Over that 36-month term, the commitment to a single supplier runs to roughly $45 billion, close to a full year of Anthropic's entire claimed run-rate. The company has separately committed hundreds of billions of dollars to Amazon, Google, and Broadcom over the next decade. None of it is public while the draft stays confidential, though a public S-1 would put those obligations, and the margins beneath them, on the record.

The analyst split, from Wedbush to Bank of America

Wall Street does not agree on what the trio signals. Dan Ives of Wedbush calls Anthropic's valuation "just the tip of the spear" and argues the market resembles 1997 rather than 1999, with the Nasdaq headed to 30,000 by 2027. John Blank, chief equity strategist at Zacks, told CNBC: "I see it as a market top," he said, reaching for the 1999 comparison directly. Bank of America's Michael Hartnett warned that the three listings would push technology's weight in the S&P 500 past 48%, beyond the concentration peaks of the Nifty Fifty and the dot-com era. Jay Ritter, the University of Florida IPO researcher, was blunt about the entry price. "At the potential prices that have been reported, it would be very difficult for an investor to come out ahead in a three-year period," he told the New York Times.

Anthropic's revenue figures are still unaudited and self-reported. The numbers that would test them stay with the SEC until Anthropic files a public S-1, which Bloomberg reported could come this fall. OpenAI is preparing its own, and SpaceX goes public first, on June 12.

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Marcus Schuler

San Francisco

Editor-in-Chief and founder of Implicator.ai. Former ARD correspondent and senior broadcast journalist with 10+ years covering tech. Writes daily briefings on policy and market developments. Based in San Francisco. E-mail: editor@implicator.ai