Anthropic IPO can break SpaceX's Wall Street record: Here's how

Anthropic is heading toward a stock market debut that could outsize even SpaceX's blockbuster June listing, and it's getting there on the back of a business that barely existed at this scale eighteen months ago. The Claude developer's IPO is expected within weeks. Here's what's driving the number and what could complicate it.

Anthropic, founded in 2021 by former executives of OpenAI, felt that the dangers associated with AI were not being appreciated in their former company.

Anthropic's CEO is Dario Amodei, a native of San Francisco with a PhD in biophysics from Princeton and not your typical computer science founder from the technology world. For many years, this outsider position applied to the company as well, lagging behind OpenAI in consumer interest since the release of ChatGPT in 2022.

Unlike OpenAI, which dived into video generation and consumer applications, Anthropic took the route of developer and enterprise software, which proved to be a niche business that happened to be one of the few areas where people actually pay good money for AI.

And the results followed; Claude Code pushed the company's run-rate above $65 billion as of late July, compared to its end-of-2025 level of under $10 billion.

In February, the Trump administration ordered federal agencies to stop using Anthropic's technology and designated the company a supply-chain risk after it refused to loosen restrictions on military use of its models.

Anthropic sued, calling the move unconstitutional retaliation, and in March, a federal judge sided with the company, blocking the designation while the case proceeds. The underlying dispute, including Amodei's public warnings about AI's risks to jobs, hasn't gone away entirely.

Anthropic's valuation reached $965bn after a $65bn raise in May, a figure now beyond what most venture funds can absorb alone. Going public opens a much deeper pool of capital but also invites public-market scrutiny that private funding rounds never required.