Anthropic Files for IPO, Beating OpenAI to the Public Markets

Anthropic has filed for an initial public offering, moving ahead of rival OpenAI in the race to go public, NBC News reports.

The filing marks a turning point for Anthropic, the San Francisco-based artificial intelligence company best known for its Claude line of chatbots. It also signals that the largest private companies in artificial intelligence — ventures valued in the hundreds of billions or more — now see public markets as the next stage of their growth.

According to NBC News, Anthropic's IPO filing puts it ahead of OpenAI, its chief competitor in frontier AI development. OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, has itself been the subject of intense speculation about a potential public listing, but has not yet filed ahead of Anthropic.

NBC News frames the development as part of a broader trend: trillion-dollar startups are racing to go public. The description underscores the scale at which the most valuable private technology companies now operate — valuations that, until recently, existed almost nowhere outside the public markets.

For Anthropic, an IPO would represent the clearest test yet of investor appetite for artificial intelligence businesses at a time when spending on AI infrastructure is running at historic highs. Public listing rules would require the company to disclose financials, giving markets their first detailed look at the economics behind one of the most closely watched AI firms.

The move also sharpens the competitive contrast with OpenAI. The two companies, both built around large language models and both backed heavily by major technology investors, have raced each other on model releases, enterprise contracts and now — evidently — access to public capital.

Details typically disclosed in such filings — the number of shares, the expected valuation and the timing of the offering — have not been made public at this stage, and NBC News does not report them. IPO filings of this kind are often made confidentially at first, with full terms emerging closer to a roadshow.

What comes next is a waiting game. If Anthropic's offering proceeds, it would become the first of the trillion-dollar-class AI startups to trade publicly — and set the benchmark against which OpenAI, and every AI listing that follows, will be measured.