Anthropic IPO: The Claude Maker's Race to Go Public in 2026

TL;DR — Anthropic, the maker of Claude, confidentially filed for a US IPO with the SEC around June 1, 2026, according to CNBC and Fortune. The filing follows a $65 billion funding round that valued the company at roughly $965 billion, and lands as annualised revenue reportedly hit about $47 billion in May 2026 — up from roughly $9 billion at the end of 2025. Anthropic has also told investors it expects its first-ever operating profit, around $559 million, in the June quarter, setting up a fall 2026 listing race against OpenAI.

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What Anthropic actually filed

On June 1, 2026, Anthropic submitted a confidential draft registration statement — effectively a Form S-1 — to the US Securities and Exchange Commission, CNBC reported. A confidential filing lets a company begin the IPO review process privately, refining its prospectus with regulators before any numbers become public. That means the figures circulating now come from reporting and from materials Anthropic shared with investors, not from a published prospectus.

The timing is deliberate. Reuters-style coverage across CNBC, Fortune and Yahoo Finance frames the move as Anthropic positioning to be among the first frontier-AI labs to test public markets. The company is reportedly weighing a debut on Nasdaq or the NYSE as soon as the autumn, with investment banks including Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley said to be under consideration to lead the offering.

The revenue story behind the filing

The headline number driving investor enthusiasm is growth. Anthropic's annualised revenue run rate reached roughly $47 billion in May 2026, according to estimates from research firm Sacra and reporting by The AI Insider — a jump from about $9 billion at the end of 2025. The company has told investors it expects to surpass a $50 billion annualised run rate by the end of June.

That trajectory is steep even by AI standards. For context, the run rate sat near $4 billion in mid-2025 before accelerating sharply through the spring of 2026. Much of the momentum comes from enterprise adoption and from Claude Code, Anthropic's agentic coding product, which reportedly crossed $1 billion in annualised revenue within months of becoming generally available and has continued to climb. We covered the structural reasons for this surge in our look at why Anthropic is growing faster than many rivals.

Figures are drawn from CNBC, Fortune, Sacra and Wall Street Journal reporting and reflect investor materials, not an audited public prospectus.

A profit projection that comes with caveats

Perhaps the most striking claim is profitability. According to a Wall Street Journal report, Anthropic projected its first-ever operating profit of about $559 million for the second quarter of 2026, on roughly $10.9 billion in quarterly revenue — a figure the company framed as more than double the prior quarter's $4.8 billion. If accurate, that would make Anthropic one of the few frontier labs to reach operating profitability at this scale, and notably ahead of the timeline many analysts expected.

The caveats matter. These are internal projections shared during a fundraising process, and such figures tend toward optimism. Some commentators have also questioned whether the near-term profit picture is flattered by favourable ramp pricing on large compute contracts. "Operating profit" also excludes a range of costs that a full income statement would capture. In short: the direction of travel is real and well-documented, but a single projected profitable quarter is not the same as durable, audited profitability. Investors will get a clearer view only when Anthropic's prospectus becomes public.

Who owns Anthropic — and why the IPO reveals it

One under-appreciated consequence of going public is disclosure. Anthropic's two largest corporate backers, Amazon and Google, have poured enormous sums into the company, and the IPO will finally clarify how much each stands to gain. Amazon's committed capital has reportedly reached around $33 billion, making it the largest corporate backer of any private AI company to date, while Google has committed billions more and holds a stake reported at roughly 14%. Crucially, reporting indicates neither holds board seats or voting control — both are positioned as minority, non-controlling investors.

That structure is significant. It allows Anthropic to tap deep cloud-and-capital partnerships without ceding governance, an arrangement the company has emphasised as central to its independence. President Daniela Amodei has publicly defended the IPO push, arguing in remarks reported by The AI Insider that access to public capital markets is essential for firms competing at the AI frontier, given the enormous upfront cost of training and serving large models.

The race with OpenAI

Anthropic did not file in a vacuum. OpenAI reportedly submitted its own confidential IPO paperwork roughly a week later, around June 8, 2026, with both companies eyeing public debuts in the autumn. For the first time, Anthropic's private valuation has been reported as eclipsing OpenAI's, lending the filing extra symbolic weight. We explored the broader competitive dynamics in our piece on the OpenAI vs Anthropic AI race, and tracked OpenAI's own market plans in our OpenAI IPO 2026 coverage.

By filing first, Anthropic seized a measure of narrative advantage — being the earliest to expose audited frontier-AI financials to public scrutiny. There is a flip side: whoever moves first effectively sets the market's expectations, and a second mover can watch how institutional investors react before committing to a price. The order of filing does not guarantee the order of listing, which remains subject to SEC review and market conditions.

Why this matters beyond Wall Street

A successful Anthropic listing would be a milestone for the entire AI sector. It would put audited, frontier-scale financials in front of public investors for the first time, offering a far clearer read on the unit economics of large-model businesses than the private market has allowed. It would also test a central question hanging over the industry: whether the staggering revenue growth on display can translate into the kind of sustained profitability public shareholders demand.

For users and builders, the stakes are practical. A well-capitalised, publicly traded Anthropic has more resources to invest in model capability and reliability — themes we examined in our analysis of Anthropic's future potential. But public-company pressures can also reshape pricing, product priorities and the pace of releases. The IPO is less an endpoint than the start of a new, more transparent chapter.

The bottom line

Anthropic's confidential filing is real and well-corroborated: an S-1 lodged around June 1, 2026, a roughly $965 billion valuation, annualised revenue near $47 billion, and a projected first operating profit of about $559 million in Q2. The growth is extraordinary and the ambition is clear — the Claude maker wants to reach public markets in 2026, ideally ahead of OpenAI. What remains unverified until the prospectus is public is the durability of that profitability and the precise economics underneath it. Treat the projections as directionally strong but provisional, and watch for the audited numbers that will eventually replace today's investor briefings.