Anthropic, the artificial intelligence company behind the chatbot Claude, confidentially filed on Monday for an initial public offering, joining what could be a once-in-a-generation, moneymaking moment on Wall Street.
With its I.P.O. filing, Anthropic is expected to be among three high-profile companies preparing to go public this year, along with the rocket company SpaceX and OpenAI, which started the A.I. boom in 2022 with its ChatGPT chatbot.
Their I.P.O.s, which would be among the biggest ever, could create a tsunami of investment and employee wealth, and mint the world’s first trillionaire in Elon Musk, who owns about 50 percent of SpaceX. The public offerings could also flood the nonprofit world with new money, since Anthropic and OpenAI have both pledged a large part of their shares to charity. SpaceX’s I.P.O. is expected this month, and OpenAI has been preparing to file in the coming weeks.
An I.P.O. filing also ratchets up Anthropic’s competition with OpenAI. Last week, Anthropic officially passed OpenAI as the world’s highest-flying A.I. start-up with $65 billion in new financing that valued it at $900 billion before the inclusion of the new capital. OpenAI’s last valuation was $730 billion.
In a statement, Anthropic said the filing “gives us the option to go public” after a review of its paperwork by the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company did not provide details about the timing or size of an I.P.O. and said the deal would “depend on market conditions and other factors.” With the filing on Monday, a public offering could happen as soon as this fall.
Among the three companies racing to go public, Anthropic is the youngest and fastest growing, thanks in large part to its A.I. tools for automatically writing computer code. Last week, Anthropic said its revenue run rate, which is its expected revenue for the year based on its current performance, crossed $47 billion in May. It is unclear if the company is profitable.
“The coding focus is what makes this filing interesting,” said Shashi Bellamkonda, a director at Info-Tech Research Group, a technology research and advisory firm. “Anthropic didn’t try to be everything. No browser, no image generation, no commerce layer. That discipline is now a $47 billion run rate.”
Founded in 2021, Anthropic was started in San Francisco by Dario Amodei, its chief executive, and a handful of other researchers who worked with him at OpenAI. Since he started the company, Mr. Amodei has repeatedly described what he believes is the transformative nature of so-called artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., an as-yet-unattained artificial intelligence that can match the abilities of the human brain.
Anthropic has also stressed that this technology could be dangerous to humanity. That focus on safety has helped Anthropic maintain a positive public image, but it has also led to tension. This year, the Pentagon banned Anthropic’s technology from its systems because the company wanted to place some limits on what military and intelligence officials could do with it.
More recently, Anthropic’s relationship with the federal government has been in flux after it released a powerful model called Mythos, which can identify and fix security vulnerabilities in software systems. Mr. Amodei has visited the White House as intelligence agencies grapple with how Mythos works.
Other A.I. labs, like OpenAI and Google’s DeepMind, have built a wider array of products, including A.I.-focused web browsers, commerce tools and image generation apps. But Anthropic has focused mostly on building A.I. that excels in coding software and tools for business customers.
Last fall, that focus appeared to pay off. Anthropic produced a breakthrough model with Claude Opus 4.5, which the company described as “a meaningful step forward in what A.I. systems can do,” with an emphasis on software coding. Its use soared, and Anthropic revenues skyrocketed as more business customers began paying for the service.
“Claude’s latest advancements have driven large-scale adoption among the world’s most demanding organizations,” said Brad Gerstner, founder of Altimeter Capital, which is an Anthropic investor.
There has long been interest to own a piece of Anthropic, with investment firms such as Menlo Ventures, Greenoaks Capital, Coatue and XN pouring money in, as well as technology companies including Amazon, Google, Samsung, Micron and SK Hynix.
A significant amount of the money Anthropic has raised is likely to pay for the rising cost of computing power, known as “compute,” a scarce resource given the increasing demand for A.I. software. Mr. Amodei has said Anthropic is seeing “unprecedented demand” for its products, which requires it to pay for even more compute from companies like Microsoft, Amazon and Google to keep up.
Anthropic also faces stiff competition. OpenAI has reoriented itself to focus on coding products with Codex, its software coding tool. Mr. Musk, who runs SpaceX, agreed to team up with and potentially acquire Cursor, a competing software coding-focused start-up. Larger companies, including Google and Microsoft, also offer their own coding tools to developers.
But SpaceX has also become a partner to Anthropic. Anthropic recently said it had reached an agreement to use all the computing power at the rocket company’s Colossus 1 data center in Memphis. The move gives Anthropic access to more than 220,000 A.I. chips and opens the door to working with SpaceX to create A.I. data centers in space.
(The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in 2023, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The two companies have denied those claims.)
Cade Metz contributed reporting.
