Anthropic confidentially files IPO ahead of OpenAI

Anthropic confidentially filed paperwork for a U.S. initial public offering, Reuters reports, moving ahead of rival OpenAI in the race to list. Multiple outlets, including the BBC, NBC, WSJ and CNBC, cover the filing and place Anthropic's most recent private valuation at about $965 billion following a $65 billion funding round, per Fortune and CBS News. The company has said the number of shares to be offered and the price have not yet been set. Anthropic's annualized revenue run rate reached roughly $47 billion at the start of May, up sharply from about $30 billion a month earlier, with growth driven largely by its Claude Code enterprise product, according to CNBC and other reporting.

Seeking Alpha surveyed analysts who, in a published roundup, slightly favored Anthropic as a cleaner financial bet while rating OpenAI higher on brand and platform reach. The same roundup flagged high token and compute costs as a shared risk to enterprise adoption and margins for both companies.

Industry-pattern observation: large LLM operators face a familiar trade-off between delivering higher-context, higher-quality models and keeping per-query compute costs manageable for enterprise contracts. For practitioners, that trade-off affects product architecture, inference-cost optimization, and SLO budgeting when integrating third-party models like Claude or OpenAI APIs.

Reporting by Reuters and the Economist places Anthropic's filing in a wider wave of expected listings that includes SpaceX and OpenAI. Industry-pattern observation: when frontier-tech companies list, investors focus heavily on the monetization path, gross margins on compute-heavy products, and the scale of enterprise contracts; those elements typically drive post-IPO multiples more than headline valuations.

Observers will read any eventual S-1 closely for three things:

• •revenue and growth breakdowns by product and customer type;
• •gross-margin composition, specifically the share of revenue consumed by cloud and GPU costs; and
• •metrics on enterprise contracts, retention, and multi-year commitments.

Reporting from the BBC and CNBC notes OpenAI has signaled it is in no rush to go public. For implementation teams, disclosed metrics on cost-per-token, latency SLAs, and partner channels will be material signals for procurement and architecture decisions.

Anthropic has moved first to confidentially file for an IPO at a near-trillion-dollar valuation. The filing and any subsequent S-1 disclosures will be the primary evidence investors and technical buyers use to reprice the sector and to judge how aggressively to adopt third-party LLM platforms.