Anthropic files for IPO — Claude maker races OpenAI and SpaceX to Wall Street
No price or number of shares have been set yet.
Anthropic, the company behind the large language models known as Claude, has confidentially filed to go public, it announced in a blog post. This sets up a race to Wall Street, as SpaceX (which now owns xAI) and OpenAI are also making moves to raise capital from retail investors.
The company filed a Form S-1 with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, but there's very little information. The company has yet to set a price target or the number of shares it would sell.
Beyond raising funds from a larger number of investors, going public could allow some of Anthropic's employees to sell equity they have earned during their tenure, increasing the fortunes of AI researchers and other employees.
Anthropic, founded by former OpenAI employees including chief executive officer Dario Amodel, has changed tactics, focusing its chatbots and other features on enterprise users, such as its Claude Code feature. It also developed its Mythos model, which it hasn't released widely and has used with partners to help discover and close security vulnerabilities.
Just last week, Anthropic surpassed OpenAI to become the most valuable AI startup, nearing a $1 trillion valuation.
But of the AI companies, Anthropic has also been the one to suggest that caution needs to be exercised around its technologies. That came to a head this year when the Trump Administration wanted the AI lab to remove guardrails. When Anthropic refused, the Pentagon deemed the company a supply chain risk, though Amodei has been to the White House to discuss Mythos.
If Anthropic does go public, it's likely to be one of the biggest IPO's ever. And if it goes public at the same time as SpaceX and OpenAI, it could make a lot of the companies' employees very wealthy.
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Andrew E. Freedman is a senior editor at Tom's Hardware focusing on laptops, desktops and gaming. He also keeps up with the latest news. A lover of all things gaming and tech, his previous work has shown up in Tom's Guide, Laptop Mag, Kotaku, PCMag and Complex, among others. Follow him on Threads @FreedmanAE and BlueSky @andrewfreedman.net. You can send him tips on Signal: andrewfreedman.01
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Notton I'd be cautious...Reply
If I had no other choice between Anthropic, OpenAI and xAI, I'd take Anthropic.
I fully expect a rug-pull from OpenAI, and xAI to happen at some point.
Not that I fully trust Anthropic either. They don't order from Oracle with the money they got from Nvidia, but they're still part of the monetary pledge loop. -
timsSOFTWARE The AI companies are risky bets - just like the web companies in 2000. If you had known Amazon was going to become the juggernaut that it did, then even if you held through the crash that reduced their stock price by 97%, you would have done very well in the end. But I don't think anyone - probably not even Jeff Bezos himself - would have been able to tell you in 2000 that they were going to become the #1 overall seller of everything, and that most of their profit would come from selling cloud computing services - a sector that didn't really exist yet.Reply
And so similarly here, LLMs are probably not the end of the line/most advanced final form of AI. Maybe what's next will come from one of these AI firms that are big today - or maybe it won't. -
JamesJones44 Reply
It's honestly worse than it was in 2000 by a lot. Back then you didn't have private equity running companies valuations up 1000s of percentage points before they even came to market. It was at least a semi level playing field for public buyers back then. Now, most of the money from an investment point of view has been made. Public buyers are being left with the table scraps.timsSOFTWARE said:The AI companies are risky bets - just like the web companies in 2000
Whether any of the AI names can turn a meaningful profit is irrelevant for private equity investors that have run the valuation up as they will or have already cashed out by IPO day. -
alan.campbell99 Dario is just as likely to rug pull as any of these other grifters. I don't trust any of them and see no reason to.Reply
https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/01/05/claude-devs-complain-about-surprise-usage-limits/ -
bill001g Reply
They will still get massive number of people lining up to buy. Look at game stop. Game stop was laughing all the way to the bank as they issued new shares. The only reason they still exist is they put all the money in bitcoin rather than spend it on the actual business of brick and mortar stores. At least this time you don't have thousands of idiots with free stimulus money from the government they can't wait to gamble.JamesJones44 said:It's honestly worse than it was in 2000 by a lot. Back then you didn't have private equity running companies valuations up 1000s of percentage points before they even came to market. It was at least a semi level playing field for public buyers back then. Now, most of the money from an investment point of view has been made. Public buyers are being left with the table scraps.
Whether any of the AI names can turn a meaningful profit is irrelevant for private equity investors that have run the valuation up as they will or have already cashed out by IPO day.
It seems to be a large number of people love to find new ways to gamble online. Risky stock is just one when you can bet if the USA bombs Iran on a certain day it is even more absurd.