Anthropic Is Aiming for the Biggest IPO in History: Matching or Beating SpaceX's $75 Billion Record

The maker of Claude is not planning a modest debut. According to a Bloomberg report published Friday, Anthropic expects its initial public offering to match — or potentially exceed — the largest IPO on record: SpaceX’s $75 billion raise from June 2026. A public S-1 filing could arrive as soon as the end of this month.

If the five-year-old company pulls it off, the listing would cement a startling reversal at the top of the AI industry. For most of the past two years, OpenAI was the category-defining juggernaut and Anthropic the fast, safety-branded challenger. Now Anthropic is the one with the larger private valuation, the faster-growing revenue, and the first credible shot at a record-shattering public market debut.

The numbers behind the ambition

Anthropic’s confidence rests on a revenue curve that has gone nearly vertical. The company’s annualized revenue run rate hit $65 billion by the end of July, according to Bloomberg — up from roughly $47 billion in May and about $10 billion for all of 2025. In the space of eight months, Anthropic has compressed a decade of typical enterprise software growth into three quarters.

The private markets have already repriced the company accordingly. In May 2026, Anthropic raised $65 billion at a $965 billion valuation, overtaking OpenAI, which raised $122 billion in March at an $852 billion valuation. A confidential S-1 filed in early July reportedly carries that same $965 billion figure — an implied multiple of roughly 20x current run-rate revenue, aggressive even by AI-boom standards.

The target is SpaceX’s June 2026 IPO, which sold about 555 million shares at $135 each to raise $75 billion (nearly $86 billion including the overallotment option) at a valuation near $1.8 trillion — the largest initial public offering in history. Matching that would mean Anthropic selling roughly as much stock in one offering as most Fortune 100 companies are worth.

The uncomfortable line in the S-1

There is one number investors will have to digest: losses. Anthropic lost almost $42 billion in 2025, roughly five times its loss the previous year, as spending on training compute, inference capacity, and talent scaled ahead of revenue. The gap between a $65 billion run rate and a $42 billion annual loss means Anthropic is still consuming cash at a pace that only mega-cap balance sheets — or the public markets — can comfortably fund.

That is the real story of this IPO. The private AI funding era is showing strain: recent reporting describes “AI debt surge” and emerging investor fatigue, and even OpenAI’s development pace has slowed this month amid safety overhauls. Public markets are the next liquidity frontier, and Anthropic — with the strongest top-line growth of any AI lab — is first through the door.

Why Anthropic, and why now

Three forces are converging. First, enterprise demand for Claude has compounded through coding agents and API usage, turning Anthropic into the default second vendor for companies wary of OpenAI dependence. Second, the OpenAI rivalry has become an outright capital race: overtaking OpenAI’s valuation in May gave Anthropic the narrative lead, and an IPO would convert that narrative into permanent public-market capital. Third, the window is open — SpaceX proved in June that public investors will absorb tens of billions of dollars of a frontier-tech story at trillion-scale valuations.

The end-of-August S-1 timeline reported by Bloomberg suggests Anthropic wants the offering priced while that window is still wide open.

What to watch

• The filing itself. A public S-1 by end of August would expose Anthropic’s full financials — gross margins, compute costs, customer concentration — for the first time.
• The size. Anything at or above $75 billion ties the record; above $86.2 billion including greenshoe breaks it outright.
• Valuation vs. SpaceX. Anthropic’s $965 billion private mark is roughly half SpaceX’s float valuation. Watch whether public investors pay the 20x-revenue premium or push back.
• OpenAI’s response. A successful Anthropic debut will intensify pressure on OpenAI to detail its own liquidity path.
• The loss tolerance question. Whether markets sustain a $40-billion-a-year burn rate at scale is the single biggest unknown hanging over the entire AI capital cycle.

A record IPO would not just be a milestone for Anthropic. It would be the moment the AI boom formally transfers its financing from venture funds and sovereign investors to pension funds, index funds, and retail investors — with everything that implies for both the industry’s staying power and its systemic risk.