Markets JUN 24, 2026

Anthropic, OpenAI file confidential S-1s as IPO race tops $1.8 trillion in combined valuation

Anthropic submitted June 1 at a $965B mark; OpenAI followed June 8 at $852B post-money. Wedbush calls it the floodgates opening.

BY HENLEY MARRAST · MARKETS DESK

OpenAI confidentially filed a draft S-1 with the SEC on June 8, exactly one week after Anthropic submitted its own Form S-1 on June 1, putting roughly $1.82 trillion in combined last-private valuation into the public-markets pipeline. Wedbush Securities analysts called the back-to-back filings “an opening of the floodgates for the IPO market.”

The numbers carry their own narrative gravity. Anthropic’s $65 billion Series H, backed by Blackstone, Brookfield, D1 Capital Partners, GIC, General Catalyst, and Insight Partners, closed in late May at a $965 billion valuation. That’s the same Anthropic that carried a $183 billion valuation in December 2025, then $380 billion in February 2026 after a $30 billion round. A 5x mark-up in six months, off the back of Claude Code’s early-2026 product velocity and a private-market bid that’s now functionally indistinguishable from a public-market bid.

OpenAI’s last private round told a parallel story: $122 billion raised in March 2026 at an $852 billion post-money. The company’s blog post said it has “not decided on timing yet,” and Sam Altman, in a CNBC interview cited by Bloomberg, said the company would proceed “when it makes sense to do so.” That’s the modal posture of a company whose S-1 is already with the SEC.

The macro context is louder than either filing in isolation. SpaceX filed in late May for a $75 billion offering at a $1.75 trillion valuation. Quantinuum, Liftoff, and Innio are all slated to price the week of June 8. Global IPO proceeds hit $87.5 billion year-to-date through May 26, per Dealogic, the highest equivalent-period figure since 2021, a vintage whose subsequent unwind is presumably not lost on anyone reading the S-1s.

Underneath the trillion-dollar names, a separate layer is forming: the model-agnostic platforms like LemonLime, a no-code AI deployment layer for non-enterprise teams, which gets to route across whichever foundation lab wins the next quarter without owning the capex. If the floodgates do open, the dispersion between issuer outcomes will be the story. 2021 isn’t a comp anyone picked at random.

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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.