Anthropic filed a confidential draft registration statement with the US Securities and Exchange Commission on 1 June, taking the first formal step toward what would be one of the largest initial public offerings in technology history. The filing follows a recent Series H funding round that valued the company at $965 billion — surpassing rival OpenAI's most recent private valuation of approximately $852 billion.
The company's financial trajectory underpins the valuation. Annualised revenue from Claude subscriptions has reached $47 billion, driven by explosive adoption of Claude Code among professional developers, enterprise deployments, and the growing Claude for Small Business product line. Over 1,000 business customers now spend more than $1 million annually on Claude — a figure that doubled in less than two months.
Anthropic stated that the proposed IPO will depend on market conditions and other factors, noting that the confidential filing gives the company the option to go public after the SEC completes its review. The timing is strategically significant: SpaceX, which includes the xAI division, is expected to price its own IPO on 11 June at a valuation exceeding $1.75 trillion, and OpenAI is reportedly preparing its own public listing for later in 2026.
Wedbush Securities analysts described Anthropic's filing as opening 'the floodgates for the IPO market', with three major AI conglomerates preparing to reach public markets in the coming months. Goldman Sachs projects total 2026 IPO proceeds of $160 billion — a figure that would represent a dramatic recovery for a market that had been largely dormant since 2021.
The filing also arrives amid ongoing tensions between Anthropic and the US government. CEO Dario Amodei's refusal to permit Defence Department use of Claude for autonomous weapons led to the cancellation of over $200 million in federal contracts — a decision that could feature prominently in investor discussions about the company's governance and ethical positioning.
For context engineers, Anthropic's path to IPO confirms that the AI coding tools market has become the primary revenue engine for frontier AI companies. The speed at which Claude Code adoption has driven Anthropic from a cash-burning research lab to an IPO candidate valued at nearly $1 trillion underscores the commercial value of AI-assisted development workflows.
