Anthropic moved toward a public stock offering on Monday, submitting paperwork to federal regulators in a move that could put the company on U.S. stock exchanges within months.
The company said it had confidentially submitted a draft Form S-1 to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. That filing allows a company to begin the process of going public while keeping its financial details private during the initial review period. According to a report by CNET, Anthropic has not yet set the number of shares to be offered or the price, and said the move will "depend on market conditions and other factors."
An Anthropic representative did not immediately respond to questions about timing or valuation.
Patrick Corrigan, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame, told CNET that confidential filings do not guarantee a final IPO decision, and that the company could still pull back. Based on typical SEC timelines, a public filing could be expected in a few weeks, with stock trading potentially starting in two to four months.
Anthropic is the maker of Claude, a large language model that competes directly with OpenAI's ChatGPT. The company raised $65 billion in a funding round last week that valued it at $965 billion. It has focused heavily on business customers.
The IPO move puts Anthropic in a group of major AI companies moving toward public markets this year. SpaceX, which also includes the Starlink internet service, the xAI lab, and the social network now known as X, filed for an IPO in May. OpenAI is expected to follow.
The rush reflects pressure building inside the AI industry. These companies require enormous amounts of capital to train and run large language models, maintain data centers, and purchase the chips and energy needed to keep systems running. Valuations have climbed so high that private funding rounds are becoming difficult to sustain.
"Their valuations are, at this point, so high that it's becoming increasingly impractical to raise more capital, and their investors are likely demanding some kind of liquidity event," said Ed Zitron, author of the Where's Your Ed At newsletter and host of the Better Offline podcast.
An online tracker of revenue and losses cited in the CNET report found that more than twice as much money has been spent on AI development as has been made back, pointing to billions of dollars in accumulated debt across the industry. Critics have also raised concerns that some AI companies have used accounting methods that inflate apparent revenue while hiding poor profit margins. The only major player that has come out clearly ahead financially is Nvidia, which manufactures the chips at the center of AI development.
A public offering would open Anthropic's books to scrutiny for the first time, giving investors a clearer look at the company's actual revenue, costs, and path to profitability.
