Anthropic Hits $965 Billion Valuation, Confidentially Files for IPO — Surpassing OpenAI
Anthropic has surpassed OpenAI in private market valuation at $965 billion and confidentially filed for an IPO, driven by Claude Code's explosive enterprise growth.
The Seismic Shift at the Top of AI
Anthropic, the AI safety company behind the Claude family of large language models, has closed a financing round that values it at approximately $965 billion — a figure that makes it the first company other than OpenAI to top the private AI leaderboard. The announcement came alongside a disclosure that Anthropic has confidentially filed for an initial public offering, potentially making it one of the most significant tech IPOs since the AI boom accelerated in 2023. The milestone represents a stunning reversal of fortune: just two years ago, Anthropic was widely seen as a distant second to OpenAI in terms of commercial traction.
The engine behind this ascent is Claude Code, Anthropic's AI coding assistant, which has seen explosive adoption in enterprise environments over the past two quarters. Revenue grew from $14 billion in annualized run rate at the time of the February 2026 Series G close to $47 billion by late May 2026 — a pace of growth that few technology companies of any era have matched. The company's projected Q2 2026 operating profit of approximately $559 million would make Anthropic the first major AI frontier lab to achieve operational breakeven.
How Anthropic Overtook OpenAI
The shift in the competitive landscape has been driven primarily by the enterprise market, where Anthropic's Claude models have consistently outperformed rivals on coding, reasoning, and long-context tasks. Claude Code, which allows developers to delegate complex coding tasks directly from their terminal, has emerged as the preferred tool for software teams at major financial institutions, technology companies, and government agencies. OpenAI has attempted to counter with its own Codex enterprise offering, but analysts say Anthropic's lead in this segment has proven difficult to close.
What an IPO Would Mean
A public listing for Anthropic would likely test whether the transformative valuations assigned to AI companies in the private markets can hold up under the scrutiny of public investors. At $965 billion, Anthropic would immediately rank among the most valuable publicly listed technology companies in the world. The IPO filing, while confidential, signals that Anthropic's leadership and backers — including Google and Amazon, which have collectively committed billions in investment — believe the company has reached an inflection point in both revenue and profitability that justifies going public.
