Analysis
Anthropic moved first. The Claude maker confidentially filed a draft S-1 with the SEC on June 1, targeting an October Nasdaq listing at a $965 billion valuation, just days after closing a $65 billion Series H funding round at that identical post-money mark. The revenue backing that number is genuinely extraordinary by any startup's historical standard: a run rate of $47 billion as of its last disclosure, up from roughly $1 billion at the end of 2024 -- a thirty-fold increase in under a year and a half, and enough to move Anthropic ahead of OpenAI on revenue for the first time.
The Race for the Valuation Template
OpenAI's own IPO pipeline remains active in parallel, though less far along publicly. Both companies are effectively racing not just for capital but for something more structurally important: whichever lab lists first sets the valuation template -- comparable multiples, disclosure norms, how public markets price a business whose core product cost curve is falling as fast as GPT-5.6's recent pricing cuts demonstrate -- that the other, and every subsequent AI-lab IPO, will get measured against.
“## The Race for the Valuation Template OpenAI's own IPO pipeline remains active in parallel, though less far along publicly.”
The backdrop for either listing has gotten more complicated in the weeks since Anthropic's filing. SpaceX's June IPO, the largest in history, has fallen 45-48% from its post-listing peak heading into its first earnings report this week -- a live, ongoing case study in how quickly "largest IPO ever" enthusiasm can reverse once a company has to report against disclosed, audited numbers rather than private-market narrative. Anthropic and OpenAI investors are watching that outcome closely as a preview of how public markets might treat their own eventual listings.
The core valuation question for either company is the same one investors have been asking privately for two years: does a $965 billion mark reflect durable competitive advantage in model quality and enterprise relationships, or does it price in continued 30x-style revenue growth that becomes mathematically impossible to sustain within a few more years regardless of how good the underlying product is.
What to watch: whether Anthropic's October target holds, and whether SpaceX's post-IPO performance this week meaningfully shifts the terms -- valuation, lockup structure, disclosure timing -- either AI lab ultimately settles on for its own listing.
