OpenAI and Anthropic Race to Go Public

Anthropic's annualized revenue tripled from $9 billion at the end of 2025 to $30 billion by the end of March 2026 — a quarterly growth rate that, if sustained for even two more quarters, would make it the fastest-scaling enterprise software company in history. The driver is not chatbots. It is code.

Demand for Anthropic's Claude coding tools has outpaced every internal forecast, pushing the company into a position it did not expect to occupy this quickly: the primary candidate for the largest U.S. technology IPO of 2026. Multiple venture capital firms have proactively approached Anthropic with investment offers in recent weeks, with valuations cited by TechCrunch on April 14 reaching as high as $800 billion — double the $380 billion at which Anthropic closed its Series G round just two months ago. Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Morgan Stanley are the primary candidate underwriters, according to the same report.

The target timeline, per sources cited by TradingKey: a U.S. listing as early as October 2026, raising more than $60 billion, which would make it the world's second-largest IPO by proceeds after SpaceX.

“listing as early as October 2026, raising more than $60 billion, which would make it the world's second-largest IPO by proceeds after SpaceX.”

OpenAI is not standing still. The company closed a record-breaking $122 billion funding round earlier this year at a valuation of $852 billion and has been speaking to investment banks about a public offering as soon as the fourth quarter of 2026, according to OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar, who told CNBC on April 8 that the company intends to reserve a portion of IPO shares for retail investors — an unusual move for a deal of this size, designed to broaden the ownership base before listing. OpenAI's annualized revenue currently stands at approximately $25 billion, per its most recent disclosed figure.

The competitive dynamics have shifted faster than either company's investor presentations anticipated. Anthropic, which was valued at roughly one-third of OpenAI a year ago, has closed the gap on both revenue and enterprise adoption. TechCrunch reported on April 14 that some OpenAI investors are quietly reassessing their exposure, with one investor noting that justifying OpenAI's $122 billion round requires assuming an IPO valuation of $1.2 trillion or more — a figure that several analysts described as dependent on growth assumptions that Anthropic's Q1 trajectory is now challenging.

There is a more uncomfortable shared problem. CNBC reported on April 15 that public sentiment toward artificial intelligence in the United States is turning "decidedly negative" — at precisely the moment when both companies are preparing for the market scrutiny that public offerings require. A survey conducted by Axios and SurveyMonkey among 3,400 U.S. adults in early April 2026 found that 58% said they believed AI companies were moving too fast to deploy products without adequate safety testing, up from 41% in October 2025. That shift matters because consumer confidence in AI directly affects enterprise adoption cycles, which in turn affects the revenue projections that underpin both valuations.

Neither company is unambiguously prepared for life as a public company. OpenAI completed a structural conversion from a nonprofit-controlled entity to a for-profit public benefit corporation in early 2026, a process that resolved some governance questions but created new ones around fiduciary duty and safety commitments. Anthropic remains a public benefit corporation, a status its leadership has used to emphasise long-term safety obligations — a framing that may resonate with institutional investors concerned about regulatory risk, but that constrains the kinds of short-term financial commitments public markets typically expect.

The third major listing in this window complicates the market further still. SpaceX is widely expected to go public in 2026 at a valuation approaching $350 billion; Tomasz Tunguz of Theory Ventures estimated in an April 12 analysis that the combined SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic listings would represent a $3 trillion stress test for U.S. capital markets — the largest concentration of technology IPO supply in a single calendar year on record.

The first concrete signal of pricing will come when either company files its S-1 prospectus with the Securities and Exchange Commission. No filing has been made as of April 19, 2026. The window from S-1 filing to IPO pricing typically runs 90 to 120 days, which means any Q4 2026 listing requires a filing no later than July — roughly 10 weeks away.