Anthropic confidentially submitted a draft Form S-1 to the SEC on Monday, putting the Claude maker ahead of OpenAI in the race to a public listing and landing the filing inside an IPO season already dominated by SpaceX’s roadshow. The notice, published under Rule 135 of the Securities Act, is sparse on the usual numbers. “This gives us the option to go public after the SEC completes its review,” the company said, adding that timing “will depend on market conditions and other factors.” Share count and price haven’t been set.
The valuation context is the story. Anthropic closed a $65 billion Series H less than a week before filing, co-led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, Sequoia Capital, Capital Group, Coatue, and D1 Capital Partners, at a $965 billion mark. That clears OpenAI’s late-March post-money valuation of $852 billion (set on a $122 billion round) by more than $100 billion. CNBC reports OpenAI is readying its own confidential filing. Bloomberg framed Monday’s move as “potentially leapfrogging longtime rival OpenAI in the race toward a Wall Street debut this fall.”
Confidential submission is the operative tactic. As TechCrunch notes, it lets Anthropic begin SEC review without publicly disclosing financials, risk factors, or governance details. What’s known, via CNBC, is that the run rate has reached $47 billion from $10 billion in annual revenue the prior year, and that Claude briefly hit No. 1 on Apple’s U.S. free-apps chart in late February.
The compute math complicates the story. Last month, Anthropic struck a deal to use SpaceX’s Colossus 1 data center in Memphis, Tennessee, paying $1.25 billion per month through May 2029, a figure disclosed inside SpaceX’s own prospectus. SpaceX is gearing up for a roadshow this week, with a debut planned for the following week at a $2 trillion target and a raise above $75 billion, per TechCrunch. The same week that prints Anthropic’s largest fixed cost prints Elon Musk’s largest payday.
One overhang remains. Litigation against the Trump administration over the company’s Department of Defense blacklisting is ongoing, though in April the President told CNBC a deal with DOD was “possible.”
Anthropic was founded in 2021 by former OpenAI employees. Five years later, the two are converging on the same week of the same public-markets window, with the spinout pricing first. The 2000 dot-com cohort’s lesson was that the order of filing tends to set the order of narrative for years afterward.
Sources
- https://www.anthropic.com/news/confidential-draft-s1-sec
- https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/01/anthropic-ipo-s1-prospectus.html
- https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/01/anthropic-files-to-go-public/
- https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2026-06-01/anthropic-finally-files-the-big-one-evening-briefing-americas
- https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2026/06/01/anthropic-ai-claude-ipo/ffc2f514-5dd8-11f1-9c46-d6211372eede_story.html