Anthropic Files Confidential IPO Paperwork, Beats OpenAI to the SEC

Anthropic filed a confidential draft registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission on June 1, making it the first major AI lab to formally begin the public-market process. The company said in a statement, as reported by CNBC, that the filing "gives us the option to go public after the SEC completes its review" but that any offering would depend on market conditions.

The filing landed less than a week after Anthropic closed a $65 billion Series H that set its post-money valuation at $965 billion, according to TechCrunch's review of the announcement. That round was co-led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, Sequoia Capital, Capital Group, Coatue, and D1 Capital Partners. At $965 billion, Anthropic now carries a higher private valuation than OpenAI, which stood at $852 billion following a $122 billion raise in March, per TechCrunch.

The revenue picture is what makes the valuation somewhat defensible rather than purely aspirational. According to Fortune's reporting, Anthropic told investors its annualized run rate hit roughly $47 billion in May 2026, up from $10 billion the prior year. The company's own guidance, cited by Fortune, projects the run rate will clear $50 billion by end of July. Fortune also reported that Anthropic is on pace to post its first profitable quarter.

The product driving that curve is not the consumer Claude chatbot. Yahoo Finance reported that Anthropic's rise is largely attributable to its enterprise offerings, particularly Claude Code, its AI coding assistant. That is a meaningful data point for infrastructure-watchers: coding agents generate recurring, billable compute usage in a way that conversational queries do not. Developers running Claude Code inside CI pipelines or on long multi-file refactors are running sustained token workloads, which translate directly to the kind of predictable revenue that institutional IPO buyers want to see.

To keep up with that demand, Anthropic has been building out compute access aggressively. CNBC reported that the company struck a deal with SpaceX to use available capacity at its Colossus 1 data center in Memphis, with Anthropic paying SpaceX $1.25 billion per month through May 2029, a figure that surfaced in SpaceX's own prospectus.

The filing also carries a live legal complication. Yahoo Finance noted that the Pentagon's Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth moved to designate Anthropic a supply-chain risk, a classification that blocked the company from certain defense contracts. Anthropic has sued to remove the designation, and that litigation is still active. As reported by CNBC, President Trump told the network in April that a deal between Anthropic and the Defense Department is "possible," which is not the same as resolved.

A confidential filing means the actual S-1 contents stay private until Anthropic elects to publish them, typically weeks ahead of a roadshow. Share count and price have not been set. The market will not see revenue detail, cost structure, or formal risk disclosures until that public filing drops. What the market does know is the run-rate trajectory and the existing investor base, which is a deliberate sequencing choice by Anthropic's bankers.

OpenAI is preparing its own confidential filing, according to Fortune, and had been targeting a fall debut before Anthropic moved first. SpaceX, meanwhile, already published its prospectus and is in active roadshow mode. The result, as Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives told ABC7, is that three of the most closely watched private technology companies are now moving toward public markets in the same window, a convergence that will stress-test investor appetite for AI at scale-economy prices.

Sources cited:
- CNBC (https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/01/anthropic-ipo-s1-prospectus.html)
- TechCrunch (https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/01/anthropic-files-to-go-public/)
- Fortune (https://fortune.com/2026/06/01/anthropic-confidentially-files-ipo-965-billion-valuation/)
- Yahoo Finance (https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/article/anthropic-files-confidential-ipo-paperwork-ahead-of-openai-160929425.html)
- ABC7 San Francisco (https://abc7news.com/post/anthropic-races-public-offering-debut-confidential-sec-filing/19213604/)