Anthropic, the San Francisco-based artificial intelligence company behind the Claude chatbot, announced on Monday that it has confidentially filed for an initial public offering (IPO) on a US stock exchange. The company did not disclose the number of shares to be offered or their price, and said the listing would ultimately depend on market conditions. The move follows a major funding round announced just days earlier, in which Anthropic raised $65 billion from private investors at a valuation of approximately $965 billion — placing it on the cusp of becoming a trillion-dollar company and, notably, ahead of its main rival OpenAI, which was most recently valued at $852 billion.

Founded in 2021 by siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei and other former OpenAI executives, Anthropic has positioned itself as a safety-focused alternative in the competitive AI landscape. It has built its commercial reputation by targeting enterprise clients and developers rather than primarily consumer users. Its Claude Code product, a coding assistant for software developers, has become one of its most popular offerings and has helped drive projected annualised revenue to $47 billion. The company has said it expects to turn a profit in the first half of this year — a milestone that neither SpaceX nor OpenAI has yet reached. To meet surging demand, Anthropic has secured several gigawatts of computing capacity from Amazon, Google and Broadcom, and signed a $1.25 billion-per-month lease agreement for data centre capacity from Elon Musk's xAI Colossus facility in Memphis, Tennessee.

The IPO filing places Anthropic at the centre of what analysts describe as a potentially historic wave of market listings. SpaceX, the rocket and satellite company also led by Elon Musk, is targeting a valuation of around $1.75 trillion in what would be the largest IPO in history, with shares potentially beginning to trade as early as mid-June. OpenAI is also reportedly preparing its own confidential filing.