Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei

Anthropic PBC, the maker of the Claude AI assistant, is preparing an initial public offering that the company hopes will match or exceed the record set by SpaceX earlier this year, according to Bloomberg, in what would mark one of the largest share sales in Wall Street history.

The company confidentially submitted a draft registration statement on Form S-1 to the Securities and Exchange Commission, and could file publicly as soon as the end of August, according to people familiar with the matter cited by Bloomberg. Discussions surrounding the offering, including its ultimate size, remain ongoing and could still change.

SpaceX's June debut set the current record for a first-time share sale, raising $75 billion in its initial offering, a figure that climbed to approximately $86.2 billion once the deal's overallotment option was exercised. SpaceX priced its shares at $135 each, offering 555.6 million shares and valuing the company at roughly $1.78 trillion at the time of pricing. The stock opened around $150 on its first trading day, climbed as high as $225 intraday before settling back, and has more recently traded in the $142 to $146 range, giving the company a market capitalization of approximately $1.93 trillion.

At recent investor briefings led by Chief Financial Officer Krishna Rao, Anthropic executives declined to commit to a specific valuation figure for the planned offering, according to Bloomberg's reporting. The company is working with Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase on the IPO, with additional banks potentially being added to the underwriting roster.

Anthropic's financial profile has shifted rapidly in recent months. According to Bloomberg, the company's annualized revenue run rate reached $47 billion as of May 2026 and had climbed further, toward a pace exceeding $65 billion, according to a separate report cited by Yahoo Finance. Internal projections cited in earlier reporting pointed toward revenue reaching $100 billion to $120 billion by the end of the year. Despite that rapid revenue growth, Anthropic posted a net loss of almost $42 billion in 2025, according to documents reviewed by Bloomberg, a roughly fivefold increase from a loss of about $8.3 billion the year before, though the company reported positive adjusted operating income for the second quarter of this year.

Anthropic's most recent private funding round, completed in May 2026, valued the company at approximately $965 billion, according to CryptoBriefing. To surpass SpaceX's IPO valuation, Anthropic's public offering would need to value the company at more than $2 trillion, roughly double that May figure, reflecting the scale of investor appetite the company and its bankers appear to be betting on as they prepare the offering.

The company is separately finalizing a revolving credit facility expected to come in above its roughly $10 billion target, according to Benzinga, expanding on financing efforts the company pursued earlier in July. Anthropic has also reportedly explored issuing super-voting shares ahead of the offering, a structure that would give Chief Executive Dario Amodei and other co-founders greater control over the company even as their overall ownership stakes remain comparatively small, according to reporting from The Information cited by Bloomberg.

Anthropic appears to be racing to reach the public markets ahead of rival OpenAI, according to SiliconANGLE's reporting. Both companies have filed confidentially with the SEC, but OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman is reportedly considering delaying that company's own listing until 2027, due in part to his stated goal of reaching a $1 trillion valuation that is not yet considered feasible under current market conditions. According to Yahoo Finance's private markets data cited in earlier coverage, Anthropic was valued at roughly $1 trillion, compared with $894 billion for OpenAI, underscoring how closely matched the two companies' private valuations have become even as they pursue different public-market timelines.

Prediction markets have taken notice of the increasingly competitive race between Anthropic and SpaceX for the title of the year's largest IPO. According to CryptoBriefing, Polymarket currently prices SpaceX as the favorite to retain that distinction, with roughly 55% odds, while Anthropic sits close behind at 44% to 45%. That gap has narrowed dramatically in recent months; as recently as a few months ago, SpaceX commanded roughly 94% odds of holding the record, according to the same report. Anthropic's odds are also subject to a hard deadline: if the company's IPO slips past Dec. 31, 2026, prediction markets would resolve automatically in SpaceX's favor regardless of the eventual size of Anthropic's offering.

If Anthropic's IPO does surpass SpaceX's record, the milestone would push 2026 to the highest annual volume of U.S. IPO activity on record. According to Quartz, companies that debuted on public markets had already raised $160.6 billion as of Aug. 19, putting the year within striking distance of the previous record of $195.2 billion, set in 2021.

Anthropic and SpaceX also share a significant commercial relationship independent of their competing IPO ambitions. According to SiliconANGLE, Anthropic recently agreed to a three-year deal to purchase computing resources from SpaceX potentially worth tens of billions of dollars, reflecting the enormous computing costs both companies face as they continue training and operating large-scale AI models.

As of this report, neither Anthropic nor SpaceX has issued a formal public comment addressing the specific comparisons between their respective offerings, and the size, timing and structure of Anthropic's planned IPO remain subject to change as the company finalizes its preparations for a public filing expected before the end of the month. Given how quickly the details surrounding Anthropic's offering have evolved in recent weeks, investors and market observers are likely to continue closely watching for the company's formal S-1 filing for confirmation of the specific terms under consideration.

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