Anthropic has filed for an IPO: what does this mean for the AI market and competition with ChatGPT?

What is an IPO and why does Anthropic need it

An IPO is the moment when a private company sells its shares to the public market for the first time. Before this, the company must file registration documents containing financial statements and a description of its business.

Anthropic used the confidential submission mechanism, which means the process has been initiated, but the general public cannot yet see the actual figures. The company has officially confirmed only the fact of the filing. The number of shares and the offering price have not yet been determined.

The filing took place less than a week after the company closed a funding round at a $65 billion valuation, which raised its overall valuation to $965 billion.

Who are Anthropic and how does Claude differ from ChatGPT

Anthropic was founded in 2021 by former OpenAI employees who left the company due to disagreements over AI safety.

Claude and ChatGPT have evolved differently. OpenAI focused on the mass market. Anthropic targeted the corporate segment from the start—companies that integrate Claude into their products. This explains the explosive growth: the company's revenue reached approximately $47 billion on an annualized basis by May 2026, compared to $10 billion a year earlier.

Why they need stock market capital

Developing large AI models costs hundreds of millions of dollars. Maintaining servers and infrastructure costs billions per year. With a company valuation nearing a trillion dollars, attracting private investment becomes physically difficult: too few funds can write checks of that size.

The public market is the only mechanism capable of absorbing such sums. At a valuation nearing a trillion dollars, it is the only way to raise capital on this scale.

What this changes in the competition with OpenAI

After the IPO, both companies will be required to publish financial results every quarter. Investors will begin comparing them based on specific metrics: revenue growth, losses, and customer acquisition costs.

Until now, the competition between Claude and ChatGPT existed primarily in the media landscape. After going public, it will become measurable.

What comes next

Filing documents is not the listing date, but the start of the process. First, the SEC reviews the documents, then the company publishes the final prospectus—and only then can the actual market listing occur.

For the AI market, this marks a transition from venture capital promises to public scrutiny. For the first time, everyone will see real figures—and the competition between Claude and ChatGPT will become measurable not in the media landscape, but on the stock exchange.