Markets JUN 22, 2026

Anthropic files confidential S-1 at $965B valuation, leapfrogging OpenAI in race to fall 2026 IPO

Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan lined up on the deal; OpenAI followed days later with its own confidential filing at $852B.

BY HENLEY MARRAST · MARKETS DESK

Anthropic PBC submitted a draft S-1 to the SEC on June 1, four days after closing a $65 billion Series H that priced the company at $965 billion post-money. The filing pulls the Claude maker into pole position ahead of OpenAI, which set an $852 billion mark in its March round and submitted its own confidential S-1 roughly a week later. Two labs, two prospectuses, one underwriter bench: Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs are leading both deals, with JPMorgan rounding out Anthropic’s syndicate, per Bloomberg.

The growth numbers explain the urgency. Anthropic’s annualized run rate sat near $4 billion in July 2024, entered this year at $10 billion, and now stands at $47 billion, an 80-fold lift by Fortune’s accounting. The company has told investors it expects to clear $50 billion by the end of next month and post its first profitable quarter. OpenAI isn’t far behind on top line: CFO Sarah Friar told Bloomberg the company expects $10.9 billion in second-quarter revenue, more than double the prior period, against a ChatGPT base exceeding 900 million weekly users.

OpenAI’s own framing reads as hedged optionality. The confidential submission “gives us the option to go public sooner if that ends up being best,” the company said, while noting “there are things we want to do that are likely easier as a private company.” That’s the posture of a board that just closed a $122 billion private round in March and isn’t quite ready to expose its cost structure.

The cost structure is the subtext here. SpaceX’s IPO prospectus, disclosed by CNBC, revealed that Anthropic is paying $1.25 billion per month through May 2029 for compute at the Colossus 1 facility in Memphis. SpaceX is itself currently on a roadshow at $135 a share, targeting a $75 billion raise at $1.77 trillion. The frontier-model economy is now a closed loop of mutual customers underwriting each other’s listings.

Gil Luria of D.A. Davidson framed the rush plainly to Fortune: the two labs are racing to list before Wall Street capital runs out and to set the template for how frontier model economics get reported publicly for the first time. Anthropic could launch as soon as October, debuting near a trillion dollars, an S&P 500 top-tier valuation arriving before its first 10-K.

Sources

About the author

Henley Marrast

MARKETS DESK

Henley Marrast covers AI-equity flow, accelerator demand, and earnings prints for AI Sheet Report. She leads coverage of the public AI complex from the New York markets desk, with a focus on the daily tape and quarterly results. She has been writing about technology markets for several years.