Analysis
Anthropic is close to finalizing an expansion of its revolving credit facility to $15 billion, clearing a financing hurdle ahead of what would be one of the largest tech IPOs on record, Bloomberg reported. Morgan Stanley is leading the process, with Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup also holding prominent roles -- the same bank lineup increasingly associated with frontier-AI capital raises this year.
The Path To A Prospectus
Anthropic confidentially submitted a draft S-1 registration statement to the SEC on June 1, and CNBC reported the company was prepping Wall Street for a landmark AI listing. The company is reportedly targeting release of its public prospectus after Labor Day, with a listing window in late September or early October -- a much faster runway than OpenAI, whose CEO Sam Altman has said an IPO is unlikely before 2027. Pulse has previously tracked Anthropic's infrastructure build-out, including a $9.1 billion compute deal with Riot Platforms and its Theseus data-center financing with Macquarie and GIC, both signs the company has been provisioning balance-sheet capacity well ahead of a listing.
“## The Numbers Behind The Valuation Jump Anthropic's last funding round, a $65 billion Series H closed in August, valued the company at $965 billion post-money.”
The Numbers Behind The Valuation Jump
Anthropic's last funding round, a $65 billion Series H closed in August, valued the company at $965 billion post-money.
Reports now suggest the IPO could seek to raise more than $130 billion, pushing the overall valuation above $2 trillion -- more than double the Series H mark in roughly a quarter.
That trajectory is backed by real operating improvement: analysts estimate Anthropic posted its first-ever quarterly operating profit, about $559 million, on $10.9 billion of second-quarter revenue.
Its annualized run rate topped $65 billion by the end of July.
Anthropic's closest comparable is OpenAI, still private and reportedly negotiating its own round at up to $1.5 trillion -- meaning Anthropic's prospective $2 trillion IPO valuation would put it ahead of its larger rival on paper, at least until OpenAI's own round closes. Both companies' numbers rest on continued enterprise adoption of Claude and ChatGPT respectively holding at current growth rates; neither has been tested through a full economic cycle at this scale.
The bear case: a $15 billion credit facility is debt, not equity, and its size signals Anthropic expects to keep burning cash on compute even as it reports its first operating profit on a narrower slice of the business -- the two facts sit in tension, and how the company explains that gap in its roadshow will matter more to institutional buyers than the topline valuation number. A late-September listing window is also tight; frontier-AI IPOs of this size have not been tested in volume before, and any delay would put Anthropic's timeline directly behind Oura's planned Nasdaq debut, itself targeting a $16 billion valuation the same month.