Anthropic is telling prospective investors that its initial public offering could raise as much as, or more than, the roughly $86 billion that SpaceX collected when it listed, according to people familiar with the planning, a target that would make the AI company’s debut the largest in American stock market history. Bloomberg first reported the fundraising ambition on Thursday.
The figure is the latest escalation in the contest between Anthropic and OpenAI, which are both preparing to go public. Anthropic has been valued privately at up to $2 trillion in recent funding rounds, according to reports, and the company’s executives believe the IPO can match that scale. A raise of $86 billion or more would eclipse every previous offering, dwarfing the largest technology listings and setting a new standard for what a company can sell to public investors on its first day.
The mechanics of such an offering are as unusual as the number. A raise of that size would require tens of billions of dollars of demand, and Anthropic has been assembling that demand through conversations with sovereign wealth funds, large asset managers, and cornerstone investors who have committed to participate, according to people familiar with the process. The company is expected to sell both new shares, to raise money for its own operations, and existing shares, to let early investors and employees cash out.
The day before the Bloomberg report, Anthropic took a step that investors read as preparation for the listing: the company’s shareholders approved a structure of super-voting shares that would give founders and early backers control of the company even after it sells a large fraction of equity to the public. The arrangement, similar to ones used by technology companies from Google to Meta, protects management from the pressure of quarterly earnings, but it has also drawn criticism from governance advocates who say it insulates founders from accountability.
Anthropic’s financial trajectory explains the confidence. The company has reported preliminary second-quarter revenue of $11.5 billion, more than triple the previous quarter, according to figures shared with its investors, and it has been signing large enterprise contracts at a pace that surprised even its own executives. The growth has been driven by demand for its Claude models, which have gained a reputation in corporate markets for reliability and data security, and by a pricing structure that rewards heavy usage.
The comparison with SpaceX is deliberate. SpaceX’s listing, which raised about $86 billion, was itself unprecedented, and its success demonstrated that public investors will pay enormous sums for stakes in companies whose technology they believe will define the next decade. Anthropic’s executives have pointed to that precedent internally, arguing that AI is a bigger opportunity than space and that the company’s valuation should reflect it. Whether public investors agree is the question that the offering will answer.
The scale of the ambition has implications for the entire AI industry. A successful $86 billion offering would validate the valuations that private investors have assigned to AI companies, most of which have never earned enough to justify their price tags on conventional metrics. It would also give Anthropic a war chest that its rivals, including OpenAI, would have to match. The two companies are now effectively racing to list first, each aware that the first IPO will set the terms by which the second is judged.
Anthropic’s path to this point has been deliberate. The company has raised large sums in private markets, most recently at valuations that made it one of the most valuable startups ever, and it has used that money to build out computing capacity and research. Unlike some rivals, it has kept its spending disciplined, and its revenue growth has outrun its costs, giving it a financial profile that conventional investors can understand. That discipline is part of the pitch: Anthropic says it can grow into its valuation, not just hope the market extends credit.
There are risks in setting the bar so high. If the offering comes in below the reported ambition, the shortfall will be read as a signal that the AI bubble has peaked, and Anthropic’s competitors will feel the ripple. If it succeeds, the opposite will be true. The company’s executives have told investors they are confident in the demand, pointing to the cornerstone commitments already lined up, but the final price will be set by the market on the day, and no amount of preparation can guarantee an outcome that large.
The super-voting structure adds another layer to the story. Anthropic has framed it as protection for its mission, ensuring that the company’s direction cannot be dictated by short-term shareholders. Critics see it as a mechanism for founders to enjoy the rewards of the public market while escaping its discipline. Either way, the structure is now in place, and it suggests the company is serious about the IPO timetable.
For investors watching the AI sector, the Anthropic offering is the number to watch. The company’s revenue is growing faster than any large technology business in memory, its private valuation has climbed past a trillion dollars, and it is now telling the market it can raise more money in one day than any company has ever raised. If Anthropic delivers on that ambition, it will redefine what an IPO can be. If it falls short, it will still be the largest AI listing the market has seen.
