Anthropic is moving closer to Wall Street with a reported $47 billion annualized revenue run rate and expectations of its first quarterly operating profit. The Anthropic IPO now gives public-market investors an early chance to test whether frontier AI can combine extraordinary growth with improving economics.
Anthropic IPO moves deeper into Wall Street process
Anthropic confirmed in early June that it had confidentially submitted paperwork to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for a proposed initial public offering. The company said the offering would depend on market conditions and that it had not yet determined the number or price of shares.
The move followed a $65 billion Series H funding round that valued Anthropic at $965 billion post-money. Anthropic said its run-rate revenue had crossed $47 billion in May, highlighting the rapid growth of Claude across enterprise and professional use cases.
Recent reporting indicates bankers and investors are already using future revenue forecasts to assess what the company might be worth as a public business. Reuters reported that Anthropic is projecting roughly $190 billion to $200 billion in revenue for 2028.
$47B revenue run rate strengthens investor case
Anthropic’s strongest argument is its current growth trajectory. Revenue run rate rose from about $9 billion at the end of 2025 to more than $47 billion by May 2026, according to company figures cited by Reuters.
The company has also projected at least $10.9 billion in second-quarter revenue and is on track for its first quarterly operating profit of about $559 million. That figure matters because public-market investors have questioned whether frontier AI companies can eventually earn enough to justify the enormous cost of model training, inference and infrastructure.
Still, one profitable quarter would not settle that debate. Anthropic continues to spend heavily on GPUs, compute capacity and talent, while its longer-term valuation depends on revenue continuing to grow much faster than those costs.
OpenAI IPO comparison remains less certain
OpenAI is also preparing for a possible public offering, but its timing is less definite than some reports suggest. OpenAI confirmed on June 8 that it had submitted a confidential S-1 to the SEC, while explicitly saying it had not decided when to proceed and that remaining private longer could still be preferable.
That makes the Anthropic versus OpenAI comparison more complicated than a simple race toward September and October listings. Anthropic appears further along in presenting investors with a public-market growth narrative, while OpenAI has deliberately kept its timeline open.
The eventual comparison will focus not only on valuation and user scale but also on revenue quality, infrastructure spending, margins and how much capital each company needs to sustain frontier-model development.
Claude growth could shape AI market valuations
Anthropic’s Claude business has become increasingly important in coding, enterprise workflows and professional applications. The company says global enterprises are integrating Claude into core operations, while its infrastructure agreements with Amazon, Google, Broadcom and SpaceX are designed to expand the compute available to meet that demand.
That growth is also why investors are looking unusually far into the future when valuing the company. Reuters reported that Wall Street is considering 2028 revenue expectations rather than relying mainly on current earnings, reflecting how quickly Anthropic’s business is expanding.
AI IPO race will test frontier economics
The larger issue is whether public investors will accept the valuations that private AI markets have created.
Anthropic remains a capital-intensive company, and its margins are still affected by massive spending on computing power, training and hiring. Reuters notes that investors are effectively betting that revenue growth will eventually outpace those costs and create significantly stronger margins at scale.
That makes the Anthropic IPO more than another technology listing. It could become one of the first major public tests of frontier AI economics.
If Anthropic can demonstrate sustained revenue growth alongside improving profitability, investors may view AI laboratories as businesses capable of supporting their extraordinary infrastructure spending. If margins fail to improve, the listing could instead reinforce doubts about whether the sector’s private-market valuations have moved ahead of its underlying economics.
