Artificial intelligence startup Anthropic said Monday it has filed for an initial public offering, beating its chief rival OpenAI to the starting gate in what analysts describe as a pivotal race for capital among trillion-dollar AI companies — and Los Angeles-area investors are watching closely.
The confidential filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission comes earlier than expected. Both Anthropic and OpenAI were previously expected to begin trading in the fall. Anthropic was recently valued at $965 billion after raising $65 billion in fresh funding, and a debut at a $1 trillion valuation would immediately place it among the most highly valued companies in the world — likely marking the second- or third-largest IPO ever, behind SpaceX and Saudi Aramco.
“This gives us the option to go public after the SEC completes its review,” the company said in a statement. “The number of shares to be offered and the price have not yet been set.”
Just hours after Anthropic’s announcement, OpenAI also disclosed it had submitted a confidential S-1 filing. “We have not decided on timing yet; it may be a while because there are things we want to do that are likely easier as a private company,” OpenAI said. In March, OpenAI’s valuation reached $852 billion after raising $122 billion.
Both companies are seeking tens of billions of dollars in new capital to fund data center expansion and AI model development. Analysts believe whichever company reaches public markets first will have an advantage in the fundraising race, similar to the 2019 ridesharing IPO race when Lyft beat Uber to market and initially performed better.
“We believe this represents an opening of the floodgates for the IPO market, which has been relatively dormant for a few years,” said Dan Ives, managing director at Wedbush.
Beating OpenAI to the public markets would be a personal milestone for Anthropic’s founders, several of whom are former OpenAI employees who left to create a company structured as a public benefit corporation. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is already worth $7 billion, according to Forbes.
Both IPOs would follow SpaceX’s trillion-dollar offering, set for this month, and the trio of mega-debuts is expected to reshape the landscape of publicly traded technology companies for years to come, generating intense interest among institutional investors tracking the AI sector.
The wave of AI IPOs comes amid a broader thaw in the public markets after several years of limited activity. With SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI all moving toward public listings, investors will have unprecedented access to the AI sector — and the companies will have access to the capital markets needed to fund their increasingly expensive infrastructure buildouts.
