Anthropic and OpenAI File for Trillion-Dollar IPOs
Anthropic and OpenAI have confidentially filed for initial public offerings as the AI rivals engage in a price war and race for market dominance.
AI rivals Anthropic and OpenAI have both confidentially filed for initial public offerings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, signaling a shift toward public markets to fund massive infrastructure costs. Anthropic filed first on June 1, 2026, following a $65 billion funding round that valued the company at $965 billion. By July, secondary market transactions pushed its valuation toward $1.2 trillion, with some projections suggesting a debut valuation exceeding $2 trillion. Anthropic reported a revenue run rate of $47 billion in May, driven by enterprise tools like Claude Code.
OpenAI followed with its own confidential filing on June 8, targeting a valuation of $1 trillion. The company reported an annualized revenue run rate exceeding $40 billion by August, noting that its enterprise business now generates more revenue than its consumer segment. To compete with Anthropic and open-source models, OpenAI implemented steep price cuts for its AI tokens, sparking a price war as corporate clients balked at high usage costs.
Both firms have issued warnings about the risks of recursive self-improvement, proposing international coordination to manage catastrophic risks. Critics have dismissed these warnings as pre-IPO marketing. Meanwhile, Anthropic is embroiled in a legal dispute with the U.S. Department of Defense, which designated the firm a supply chain risk after CEO Dario Amodei refused to grant the military unrestricted access to its AI models. The companies are targeting public debuts as early as the fall of 2026, following the June IPO of Elon Musk's SpaceX.
