Founded five years ago with a valuation of $965 billion, Anthropic has just filed its prospectus.

On June 1, Anthropic confidentially filed a draft S-1 registration statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), officially launching its IPO preparation process.

Just two days earlier, on May 28, Anthropic announced the completion of its $65 billion Series H funding round, valuing the company at $965 billion (approximately RMB 6.54 trillion)—a historic first time surpassing OpenAI’s latest valuation of $730 billion. On the same day, Claude Opus 4.8 was released.

Founded in 2021 by former core members of OpenAI, this star startup is now knocking on Wall Street’s door at an unprecedented pace.

Upon learning of Anthropic’s confidential IPO filing, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman stated in a CNBC interview: “OpenAI will go public when we believe the timing is right. I think there’s currently a race underway—everyone is competing to deliver the most advanced technology and build the best companies. But you know, going public is fundamentally a financing event. I don’t think we’re currently focused on deciding the exact timing for our IPO.”

1. Confidential “Filing”

Anthropic’s submission is a confidential draft S-1—not a formal prospectus.

Under the SEC’s confidential submission rules, Anthropic is permitted to conduct internal reviews and communications with regulators before publicly disclosing its financial data. In its official statement, the company noted that after filing the confidential S-1, it may proceed with its IPO once the SEC completes its review. The specific timing and fundraising amount remain undisclosed; the actual timeline will depend on market conditions and other external factors—with a potential listing as early as this fall.

This filing comes just days after Anthropic announced the close of its $65 billion Series H round.

This round attracted top-tier financial investors—including Altimeter Capital, Sequoia Capital, and Greenoaks—as well as three global semiconductor giants specializing in memory chips: Micron Technology, Samsung Electronics, and SK hynix. Its post-money valuation surged to $965 billion—nearly reaching the current valuation ceiling for privately held AI technology companies worldwide.

A company does not rush to file for an IPO immediately after raising massive capital and holding ample cash on its balance sheet—unless it sees a much larger game unfolding: namely, the liquidity premium offered by public markets.

This geometric leap in valuation also signals a shift in how capital markets price foundational large-model AI companies: investors are no longer buying solely into the grand vision of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI); instead, they increasingly recognize the tangible possibility of a tightly integrated loop among compute, models, and real-world applications.

The consensus has shifted toward abandoning purely burn-rate-driven projects, and instead prioritizing top-tier players capable of delivering revenue and sustaining valuations.

2. From $965 Billion to Surpassing OpenAI—and $47 Billion ARR

What does $965 billion represent?

Comparing against major Chinese tech firms’ closing market caps on June 1: it equals roughly 1.9 times Tencent ($508 billion) or 3.2 times Alibaba ($300.9 billion). Against the two leading domestic large-model startups poised to return to China’s STAR Market: it amounts to approximately 11.5 times Zhipu AI ($83.6 billion) and 34 times MiniMax ($28.4 billion).

Meanwhile, Anthropic’s annualized revenue has surpassed $47 billion—exploding from $9 billion at the end of 2025. This explosive growth stems from adoption of Claude across core business workflows by the world’s largest enterprises—and Anthropic’s exceptionally rapid product iteration cycle.

The recently launched Claude Opus 4.8 delivers a 2.5x speed improvement, reduces costs by 3x, and makes significant progress on the “hallucination” issue that plagues enterprise customers—reducing the probability of missing code defects by 4x.

Moreover, with the upcoming rollout of the more powerful Mythos-class models to customers, Anthropic is building a workflow ecosystem centered on genuine commercial deployment. When compute costs are effectively managed and enterprise clients demonstrate strong willingness to pay, Anthropic has entered its harvest phase of commercial value realization.

Another noteworthy point is Anthropic’s strategic positioning in compute infrastructure. Drawing on the Series H funding announcement and prior joint disclosures, the company has secured three pivotal compute agreements:

A dedicated compute capacity partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) of up to 5 gigawatts, alongside a $5 billion strategic equity investment from Amazon in this Series H round—binding compute procurement and equity investment together;

A joint agreement with Google and Broadcom to secure a combined 5 gigawatts of next-generation TPU compute resources, providing dedicated hardware support for ongoing large-model development;

A deep compute collaboration with SpaceX, granting access to the full GPU cluster of Colossus 1.

Additionally, the Series H round brought on board Micron, Samsung, and SK hynix—the three global leaders in memory chip manufacturing—as strategic investors. These firms dominate global production capacity for high-bandwidth memory (HBM) and core storage solutions. Their dual commitment—through both equity investment and supply-chain integration—secures Anthropic’s stable long-term supply of critical hardware essential for AI model training, completing a full-stack closed loop spanning compute, chips, and supply chain.

3. IPO Gates Swing Wide Open—AI Commercial Landscape Enters a New Race

Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX are widely regarded as the three most anticipated IPO candidates of the year.

SpaceX filed its IPO application in April. Anthropic’s chief rival, OpenAI, is also expected to submit its filing shortly—transforming their competition from one of parameter counts and benchmark scores into a definitive battle for liquidity and capital pools in the public markets.

Once public, retail investors will gain access to invest in these elite AI startups, while early investors stand to realize multi-billion-dollar exit returns.

Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives described this phenomenon as “the opening of the IPO floodgates.” After several relatively quiet years, the tech IPO market is reigniting—fueled by AI’s maturation.

Why now? Much of the answer lies in AI’s seemingly bottomless demand for compute infrastructure. In the race toward Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), private funding rounds in the hundreds of millions—or even billions—can no longer sustain the consumption of thousands or tens of thousands of GPUs. Only Wall Street’s vast capital reservoirs can fuel this “arms race” in compute and energy.

Anthropic’s confidential filing marks the beginning of this tech IPO surge.