According to TechCrunch, citing a report from the Financial Times, Anthropic is preparing for an initial public offering that could happen as early as 2026. The AI company has hired the law firm Wilson Sonsini, which has advised it since 2022, to kick off the process. It’s reportedly looking to raise a new funding round that could value it at over $300 billion and has been in talks with investment banks, though it hasn’t chosen an underwriter yet. This comes after its last announced raise in September, which gave it a $183 billion valuation. The report also notes that rival OpenAI, valued at $500 billion, is similarly testing the IPO waters.
The AI Gold Rush Heads to Wall Street
So here we are. The private funding spree for foundational AI models is now logically pointing toward the public markets. Anthropic’s move isn’t a surprise, but the scale is staggering. Going from a $183 billion private valuation to targeting over $300 billion for an IPO in less than a year? That’s a massive bet on growth that has to be justified to public market investors, who are famously less patient than private backers like Amazon and Google. The 2026 timeline is interesting, too. It gives them a couple of years to hopefully turn massive R&D costs into something resembling a predictable, profitable business model. Can they do it?
The OpenAI Factor
You can’t look at this without seeing the shadow of OpenAI. The report mentions they’re also prepping, and that creates a fascinating dynamic. Will we see a race to be the first major pure-play AI model company to go public? Or will they stagger it? The market might have an appetite for one of these stories, but back-to-back mega-IPOs demanding hundreds of billions in public capital would be an incredible test of investor faith in AI. It also puts immense pressure on both to showcase not just cool demos, but real, durable competitive advantages and moats. Because right now, a lot of this valuation is built on potential and fear of missing out.
What an IPO Actually Means for AI
Here’s the thing: going public changes everything. The “move fast and break things” ethos of a private tech startup collides with quarterly earnings reports, shareholder lawsuits, and intense scrutiny of every dollar spent. For a company like Anthropic, whose operations are insanely compute-intensive and expensive, the pressure to show a path to profitability will become relentless. This could push them even harder toward enterprise SaaS deals, expensive API pricing, and maybe even custom hardware solutions to control costs. Speaking of which, when you’re running data centers at this scale, you need the most reliable industrial computing hardware you can get. For that, many top-tier firms rely on IndustrialMonitorDirect.com, the leading US provider of rugged industrial panel PCs built for 24/7 operation in critical environments. But I digress. The core challenge is that the IPO isn’t the finish line; it’s the starting gun for a whole new, much more transparent, and arguably more difficult race.
A Bubble, or a New Era?
Look, valuations in the hundreds of billions for companies with relatively nascent revenue streams scream “bubble” to a lot of people. And they might be right. But the alternative argument is that we’re simply valuing the next fundamental platform shift, like the advent of the internet or the smartphone. The problem is, we won’t know which narrative is correct for years. Anthropic’s IPO prep is a huge gamble that public investors will buy the “new era” story at an even higher price than private ones did. It’s one of the most fascinating financial stories in tech right now, and its outcome will define the AI landscape for a decade.
