The banks running Anthropic’s planned listing have begun arranging meetings between the company’s executives and potential investors, according to people familiar with the matter, a sign that the maker of the Claude chatbot is moving toward an initial public offering as early as October.
Anthropic filed confidentially with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on June 1 and has not disclosed a target date. People familiar with the process said the timing could still shift, but the scheduling of investor meetings suggests the company and its underwriters are testing demand in earnest. Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase are among the banks working on the offering, the people said. Bloomberg first reported the investor meetings. A spokesman for Anthropic declined to comment.
An IPO would be one of the most closely watched listings of the AI boom, giving public investors a direct stake in a company that has been valued at close to $1 trillion in recent financing discussions. Anthropic was founded in 2021 by Dario and Daniela Amodei, siblings who left OpenAI after disagreements over the direction of that company. Its Claude models have become a fixture in corporate computing, used by banks, retailers and software developers for tasks ranging from coding to customer service.
Revenue has grown rapidly as businesses shifted spending from experimental pilots to production workloads, according to people familiar with the company’s finances. Amazon and Google are among its largest backers; Amazon alone has committed $8 billion, and the company’s cloud service, Bedrock, distributes Claude models to enterprise customers. The scale of that backing has made Anthropic something of a proxy for the broader AI trade: its private valuation has climbed in step with each wave of enthusiasm about generative AI, and a public listing would put a market price on the boom.
Why go public now is a question bankers and investors are chewing over. Private investors’ appetite for AI names remains strong, but the recent experience of SpaceX, which listed earlier this summer and has seen its stock swing wildly since, has made issuers cautious about timing. SpaceX’s market value at one point fell by more than $1 trillion from its peak, evidence that public markets can reprice even the most hyped franchises quickly. Anthropic’s bankers are betting that the company’s growth profile, and its position as one of only two or three labs with frontier models, will be enough to command a premium regardless of the mood.
The valuation will hinge on a few numbers that have not been disclosed: current annualized revenue, growth rates and the cost of building and running the models. Analysts said the market would likely value Anthropic on revenue multiples similar to those applied to other high-growth software franchises, adjusted for the unusual capital intensity of the AI business. The company has said it intends to keep investing heavily in model development, which means public investors should expect years of heavy spending before meaningful profit, a structure that worked for Amazon and Tesla but has tested the patience of shareholders before.
OpenAI, Anthropic’s larger rival, has not announced plans for a listing, though its name comes up in the same conversations. A successful Anthropic IPO would sharpen the contrast between the two companies and could push OpenAI’s board to reconsider its own timing, analysts said. Regulators will also have a say. The SEC’s review of confidential filings typically takes months, and an October listing would require a relatively fast process, though not an unprecedented one.
For investors, Anthropic’s offering would offer a rare chance to buy pure exposure to the model race between Claude and GPT at a moment when the biggest winners in AI have mostly been the infrastructure companies selling picks and shovels. For Anthropic, a successful listing would lock in a valuation that rewards its founders and early employees and gives the company a currency for acquisitions. For the bankers, it would be a test of whether the market’s appetite for AI can survive the volatility that followed SpaceX’s debut. The meetings now being scheduled will determine whether October is realistic, or whether the company waits for calmer markets.
The meetings now under way will test that bet. Investment bankers describe the conversations as early and informal, dinners and small presentations and a first pass at the numbers, but the fact they are happening at all, months before any filing would become public, signals that the banks believe demand exists. A company of Anthropic’s profile does not schedule investor meetings without confidence in the reception.
A listing in October would come as the market digests a crowded season of AI earnings, and the reception has been mixed: Palantir was rewarded with a 29% jump, while AMD and SpaceX fell after hours despite strong results. Bankers said the volatility argues both ways. It could push Anthropic to wait for calmer conditions, or convince it to move while interest is high. Either way, the schedule is tight for a listing that would require the SEC’s review to conclude within weeks.
