Anthropic is exploring an IPO as early as October that could raise more than $60 billion, and has held preliminary talks with Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Morgan Stanley about leading it, per CNBC. The company filed confidential paperwork with the SEC on June 1. Its most recent private valuation was $965 billion, set in the $65 billion Series H it raised this spring.
The timing is the news. If October holds, Anthropic would be the first trillion-dollar-class AI lab to actually test the public market, ahead of OpenAI, which was reported to be pushing its listing into next year after watching SpaceX trade poorly. Going first carries a real trade-off. The first big AI IPO sets the comparables and absorbs the market's opening skepticism, which usually means a harder pricing conversation. Going later lets you learn from it, but gives up the scarcity premium of being the only trillion-dollar AI pure-play on the tape.
What the market will scrutinize is the gap between the mark and the cash. Anthropic is renting compute from Meta, SpaceX, and TeraWulf because it cannot build fast enough, and those are large fixed commitments set against revenue that is growing quickly but is not profitable at this scale. A raise north of $60 billion at anything near the $965 billion private mark asks public investors to underwrite roughly 20 times run-rate revenue on a company simultaneously signing billions in compute obligations. The Fable takedown this spring also showed the regulatory surface a frontier lab now carries.
Bottom Line
Going first would make Anthropic the market's referendum on trillion-dollar AI valuations. Watch whether the October window holds, because a slip would signal the bankers do not like what the comps are saying.