San Francisco-based Anthropic has asked Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati to begin work on an initial public offering (IPO) that could take place as early as 2026, the Financial Times reported this week.
The move positions the company, best known for its Claude chatbot, to reach the stock market ahead of rival OpenAI and would test investors’ willingness to fund large, loss-making artificial-intelligence labs. People familiar with the plans cautioned that discussions with investment banks remain informal and that no underwriting line-up has been chosen.
Wilson Sonsini, which advised Anthropic on its multibillion-dollar investment agreements with Amazon and Google, has previously guided Google, LinkedIn and Lyft to market.
In a statement, an Anthropic spokesperson said: “We have not made any decisions about when, or even whether, to go public.”
The IPO preparations coincide with a private fundraising round that could value Anthropic above $300 billion. Microsoft and Nvidia have jointly committed $15 billion to that round, according to the Financial Times, while Anthropic has pledged to spend $30 billion on Microsoft’s cloud platform over the next four years. A previous funding round this autumn pegged the company at roughly $183 billion.
Chief executive Dario Amodei has told investors that annualised revenue could rise to $26 billion next year, triple this year’s run-rate, as the customer base expands beyond 300,000 businesses.
Internal changes aimed at satisfying public-market requirements are already under way. Last year Anthropic hired Airbnb’s former head of corporate finance, Krishna Rao, as chief financial officer and has since worked through governance, accounting and disclosure checklists, one source said.
OpenAI, valued at about $500 billion after a recent share sale, is conducting similar early-stage work but chief financial officer Sarah Friar said last month that a listing is “not in the near-term plan.”
Both companies face the challenge of forecasting profits while spending heavily on model training and infrastructure. Anthropic recently announced a $50 billion build-out of data centres in Texas and New York and plans to triple its global workforce.