#Anthropic秘密递交IPO申请 Founded five years ago, with a valuation of $965 billion, Anthropic has just "filed" its documents
On June 1, Anthropic confidentially submitted an S-1 registration statement draft to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), officially initiating the IPO preparation process. Just two days earlier, on May 28, Anthropic announced the completion of a $65 billion Series H funding round, with a valuation of $965 billion (about 6.54 trillion RMB), marking the first time in history that its valuation surpassed OpenAI (latest valuation $730 billion); on the same day, Claude Opus 4.8 was released. This star company, founded in 2021 by former core members of OpenAI, is opening the door to Wall Street at an unprecedented speed. After learning about Anthropic's secret IPO filing, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in an interview with CNBC, "OpenAI will go public when we believe the time is right. I think there is currently a race, everyone is competing to offer the top technology and build the best companies, but you also know, going public is a form of fundraising. I don't think we will focus on the specific timing of going public right now."
Confidential "filing"
Anthropic is submitting a confidential S-1 draft, not an official prospectus. According to SEC's rules for confidential submission, Anthropic's filing is allowed to conduct internal review and communication with regulators before disclosing official financial data. In its official statement, it said that after submitting the confidential S-1, once the SEC completes its review, the company can choose to proceed with the listing; the specific timing and fundraising scale have not been disclosed, and the landing schedule depends on market conditions and external factors, with the earliest possible listing in fall this year. Just before the filing, Anthropic announced the completion of a $65 billion Series H funding round. This round attracted top financial investors such as Altimeter Capital, Sequoia Capital, and Greenoaks, as well as three global top storage semiconductor giants—Micron Technology, Samsung Electronics, and SK Hynix. Post-investment valuation soared to $965 billion—almost reaching the current global valuation ceiling for unlisted AI technology companies. A company wouldn't rush to file just after raising a huge round of funds and having ample cash on hand unless it saw a bigger game—namely, liquidity premium in the public markets. This exponential jump in valuation also indicates a shift in the pricing logic of the capital market for foundational AI model companies: the market is no longer only paying for the "grand vision of AGI," but also recognizing the realistic possibility of a perfect loop between computing power, models, and applications. Abandoning pure money-burning projects, and prioritizing leading players capable of revenue realization and valuation support has become one of the current consensus.
From $965 billion to surpassing OpenAI, with $47 billion ARR
What does $965 billion mean?
Compared to the closing prices of major domestic tech giants on June 1, it’s roughly equivalent to 1.9 Tencent (market cap $508 billion), 3.2 Alibaba (market cap $300 billion). If compared to the domestic AI giants about to return to the STAR Market—it's about 11.5 times the market cap of Zhipu AI (market cap $83.6 billion) and 34 times that of MiniMax (market cap $28.4 billion). Meanwhile, Anthropic's annual revenue has already surpassed $47 billion, a explosive growth from the $9 billion expected by the end of 2025. Behind this growth rate is the world's largest enterprises embedding Claude into core business processes; as well as Anthropic’s extremely rapid product iteration pace. The recently released Claude Opus 4.8 version has improved speed by 2.5 times, reduced costs by 3 times, and made significant optimizations on the "hallucination" issues troubling enterprise clients, reducing the probability of missed code defects by 4 times. At the same time, with more powerful Mythos-level models about to be delivered to clients, Anthropic is building a workflow ecosystem centered on real commercial deployment. When computing costs are effectively controlled and enterprise clients show strong willingness for paid closed-loop engagement, Anthropic is entering a period of commercial value realization. Additionally, it’s worth noting Anthropic’s layout in computing infrastructure. Combining the H round funding announcement and previously disclosed information, the company has secured three core computing agreements: a maximum of 5 GW dedicated capacity with Amazon AWS, with Amazon also completing a $5 billion strategic cash investment in this round, binding hardware procurement and equity investment; jointly with Google and Broadcom, securing a total of 5 GW of next-generation TPU resources to support continuous model iteration; and deep computing cooperation with SpaceX, accessing the Colossus 1 complete GPU cluster. The H round also introduced top global storage chip giants—Micron, Samsung, and SK Hynix—as strategic investors. These three companies dominate the global high-bandwidth memory (HBM) and core storage capacity, and their equity and supply chain deep binding ensures a stable supply of core hardware needed for AI model training in the coming years, completing the full chain of computing power, chips, and supply chain.
IPO gates wide open, AI business landscape accelerates
Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX are considered the three most anticipated IPO targets this year. SpaceX already submitted its listing application in April, and OpenAI, Anthropic’s main rival, is also expected to follow suit in the near future—these two have shifted from a parameter and benchmark score competition to a final battle for liquidity and capital pools in the secondary market. Wade Bush Securities analyst Dan Ives described it as "the gates of the IPO market opening wide."
The relatively dormant tech stock IPO market in recent years is now reignited due to AI maturity. Why now? The answer largely lies in AI’s nearly bottomless demand for computing infrastructure. In the race toward artificial general intelligence (AGI), private funding at the hundreds of millions of dollars level is no longer sufficient to support the consumption of clusters with thousands or tens of thousands of chips; only Wall Street’s vast capital pool can sustain this "arms race" of computing power and energy.
Anthropic’s filing marks the beginning of this tech stock IPO frenzy.
