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Key Takeaways
- Anthropic is arranging investor meetings ahead of a possible October IPO, following its confidential SEC filing last month.
- The company closed a $65 billion funding round in May at a $965 billion valuation, surpassing OpenAI’s reported $852 billion figure.
- A fall listing would put Anthropic ahead of OpenAI, which pushed its IPO timeline to 2027, and potentially ahead of DeepSeek as well.
Anthropic is arranging meetings between its executives and prospective investors as the artificial intelligence company moves closer to a potential initial public offering, according to people familiar with the plans. Banks leading the offering are scheduling the meetings for the coming weeks, positioning the Claude developer for a possible listing as soon as October, though the timing could still change.
Banks Begin Scheduling Investor Meetings
Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase, the three largest Wall Street banks by revenue, are working on the offering. The investor meetings follow Anthropic’s confidential filing of IPO paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission last month, a standard step that lets a company undergo early regulatory review before its financial details become public.
This kind of preliminary investor outreach, sometimes called “testing the waters,” is a common step before a formal roadshow. Securities rules require Anthropic to publicly file its S-1 registration at least 15 days before launching that roadshow. An Anthropic spokesperson declined to comment on the listing plans.
A Fast Climb to a $965 Billion Valuation
Anthropic, founded in 2021, closed a $65 billion funding round in May at a $965 billion valuation, making it one of the world’s largest private companies and pushing its valuation above OpenAI’s reported $852 billion figure for the first time.
The company has built its commercial base largely on demand from enterprise customers, with its coding assistant, Claude Code, gaining significant traction among software development teams. If Anthropic maintains its current valuation through an IPO, it would debut among the most valuable publicly traded companies in the world.
Racing OpenAI and DeepSeek to Public Markets
A fall listing would put Anthropic ahead of OpenAI in reaching public markets. OpenAI filed confidentially for its own IPO in June but has since pushed its expected debut from a planned fall 2026 listing to 2027. Anthropic could also list ahead of DeepSeek, the Chinese AI developer that is preparing IPO documents and may file as soon as this year, though people familiar with the matter say its listing timeline is more likely tied to financial reporting cycles and market conditions than to a fixed date.
The potential listing would come amid a broader rebound in the IPO market. Global listings have raised $227.5 billion so far in 2026, excluding blank-check vehicles, already the strongest year for public offerings since 2021, a total boosted by SpaceX’s large June IPO and last week’s U.S. listing of memory chipmaker SK Hynix. Analysts have pointed to sustained enterprise AI spending as a driving force behind the current wave of large technology listings.
Regulatory Questions Still Loom
Anthropic’s path to a listing includes some unresolved regulatory friction. The Trump administration temporarily restricted foreign access to two of Anthropic’s models, Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5, in June to comply with U.S. Department of Commerce export controls, before lifting those restrictions on July 1 after the Department removed the underlying controls.
Separately, Anthropic has sued the Department of Defense after the agency characterized the company as a risk to the U.S. domestic supply chain; that case remains ongoing as the company prepares to meet with investors. It is not clear whether either matter has affected the offering’s timeline.
