MarketsANTHSEP 06, 2026

Anthropic S-1 unveil expected within weeks as Claude maker races OpenAI to public benchmark

Anthropic and OpenAI have both filed confidential S-1s; CFO Sarah Friar told OpenAI staff Anthropic could 'pull the cover off' in September, setting the sector's first audited valuation floor.

BY HENLEY MARRAST · MARKETS DESK

Anthropic is expected to make its confidential S-1 public within weeks, according to remarks OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar delivered to employees on August 19 and relayed by two sources to CNBC. “There is a chance they pull the cover off that confidential file in the coming weeks and become public in September,” Friar said. The Claude maker filed its draft Form S-1 with the SEC on June 1 under Rule 135; OpenAI filed its own confidential S-1 shortly after. Whichever frontier lab prices first sets the audited valuation floor for the entire AI stack.

The numbers going in are enormous and asymmetric. Anthropic’s last private round pegged it at $965 billion, per NPR, above OpenAI’s $852 billion mark reported by Fortune. Anthropic’s annualized run rate hit $65 billion at end-July, a sevenfold jump year-over-year, on $11.5 billion in preliminary Q2 revenue. OpenAI’s Q2 came in at $6.7 billion per the Wall Street Journal, with an annualized run rate above $40 billion; Friar’s slides showed revenue up 35% quarter-to-date and enterprise up 50%. Neither company is profitable. Fortune notes OpenAI is losing more than it makes.

Wedbush called the sequence “an opening of the floodgates for the IPO market.”

That framing understates what an S-1 actually does. Until now, the real cost structure of frontier AI, gross margins, compute burn, customer concentration, has been narrative. An audited filing converts it to a comparable multiple, and every AI SaaS vendor gets repriced against it. If ANTH prices at or above $2T and trades well, tool vendors keep pricing cover, echoing the pricing-power dynamic Jefferies flagged in its “moat wins” note. If it breaks, the pressure reverses down the stack, particularly against the compute economics Nvidia’s $96.2B print made unmissable last month.

Owner-operators evaluating multi-year AI commitments have a legible reason to wait roughly two weeks past the unveiling. The tape will say more than any vendor deck.

Friar, addressing her own staff, gave the game away with characteristic composure. The IPO, she said, “is not a finish line, it is a milestone, another fundraise.”

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.