Fortune's July 22 feature does something that would have sounded speculative eighteen months ago: it treats a trillion-dollar AI lab IPO as a near-term, investable event, and asks market strategists how ordinary and institutional investors alike should think about positioning ahead of it. SpaceX's roughly $2 trillion public debut is the reference case -- proof that a private company widely assumed to stay private indefinitely can go public at a scale previously reserved for Apple, Microsoft and Saudi Aramco.
Anthropic is the closest live candidate. The company has reportedly filed confidentially for an IPO at a valuation near $965 billion, and critically, it just closed the $1.5 billion Bartz v. Anthropic copyright settlement with final court approval on July 20 -- removing one of the largest legal overhangs that would otherwise complicate an S-1 and roadshow. Clearing that liability right before a listing window is not a coincidence; it's the kind of sequencing investment bankers plan for specifically.
“The company has reportedly filed confidentially for an IPO at a valuation near $965 billion, and critically, it just closed the $1.5 billion Bartz v.”
OpenAI, by contrast, is reportedly further behind on IPO timing, a gap that's widened alongside reports of a delayed Gemini-competitive release and broader questions about the company's board and governance -- OpenAI just appointed two new board members this week, and the Sam Altman/Jony Ive hardware venture is reportedly at the center of internal tension over OpenAI's future direction. Two labs racing to be first to a trillion-dollar public valuation, on very different governance and legal trajectories, is exactly the kind of dynamic that keeps this story running for months.
The comparison points matter: SpaceX at $2 trillion, Aramco's roughly $2 trillion debut, and now the prospect of Anthropic at closer to $1 trillion -- these are the only handful of companies in history to even approach this scale at IPO. But SpaceX is also the cautionary tale sitting right next to the bullish framing -- the stock has traded well below its post-IPO high and CNBC reports it just snapped a seven-day losing streak, with an earnings date set that triggers the company's first major post-lockup share unlock, an event that has hammered plenty of newly public mega-caps before.
For VCs and LPs, the practical takeaway is less about timing a public listing and more about what it implies for private secondary markets in the meantime -- Goldman Sachs just launched a private markets platform explicitly built to give wealthy investors exposure to 'the next SpaceX and Stripe' before any IPO happens at all, which is arguably the more immediately actionable trend than trying to pre-position for an Anthropic listing that could still be a year or more away.