Anthropic Eyes October IPO at Roughly $965B Valuation

Anthropic is moving fast toward one of the largest tech listings ever. The AI startup is lining up investor meetings ahead of a potential IPO as soon as October as it looks to beat rival OpenAI to the public markets.

The setup

The move follows the closing of Anthropic’s $65 billion Series H round on May 28, 2026 at a $965 billion post-money valuation, and a confidential draft S-1 filed with the SEC on June 1.

Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan Chase have been appointed as underwriters, the standard heavyweight lineup for a deal of this size.

Beating OpenAI to the tape

If the October listing goes smoothly, Anthropic will beat its two key rivals to the public market. OpenAI has postponed its IPO plans from the fall of 2026 to 2027.

Sequencing matters here. First mover in AI public markets gets to set the multiple and soak up demand before any narrative cracks appear.

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The numbers behind the deal

Annualised revenue surged from $9 billion at the end of 2025 to over $44 billion by May 2026, a more than fivefold increase, with around 80% of revenue coming from enterprise customers.

The company guided Q2 revenue to $10.9 billion, against $4.8 billion in Q1, and projected its first profitable quarter at roughly $559 million in operating income.

Anthropic has found early success selling to enterprises, in large part due to its popular coding assistant, Claude Code.

Why it matters for markets

Companies have raised $227.5 billion through IPOs globally this year, excluding SPACs and other financial vehicles, already making 2026 the strongest year for listings since 2021. AI companies have been a major driver of that rebound, with SpaceX and SK Hynix both citing AI opportunities as part of their public offerings.

The October listing is the first real referendum on whether AI valuations survive contact with quarterly reporting. A clean debut re-rates the entire private AI complex. A soft tape does the opposite.

Options market and stocks to watch

Watch for reaction across the AI ecosystem and Anthropic’s biggest partners and rivals:

• GOOGL — a major Anthropic investor; a successful listing would mark up Alphabet’s stake.
• AMZN — Amazon is Anthropic’s largest backer via multi-billion-dollar investments and AWS compute commitments.
• MSFT — OpenAI’s primary partner; watch for read-across as the OpenAI IPO slides to 2027.
• NVDA — any capital raised at this scale flows back into GPU orders.
• LRN — Anthropic launched Claude for Teachers, offering its AI free to K-12 educators in the U.S., a move that directly challenges Stride’s core business.

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