Anthropic Races Toward an October IPO, Set to Beat OpenAI to the Public Market

On July 15, 2026, Bloomberg reported that Anthropic is moving fast on its first public offering, with bankers arranging a series of investor meetings for the company's leadership team. If the schedule holds, the AI lab could list on a stock exchange as early as October, beating its main rival OpenAI to the public market. OpenAI has reportedly pushed its own IPO timeline to 2027, which would leave Anthropic as the first frontier AI company to go public. The deal is being prepared at a striking valuation. After a May funding round, Anthropic was valued at $965 billion, briefly overtaking OpenAI as the most valuable private tech company on the planet. The lead underwriters are Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan, and the company is now running an intensive roadshow to line up orders from large institutional investors before pricing the shares. Behind the IPO push is a fast-growing business. Anthropic's Claude family of models has been adopted by enterprise customers in software development, finance, and customer support, where AI coding tools have become a major revenue engine. Management is betting that going public will give the company cheaper capital, broader brand reach, and a stronger hand in recruiting top researchers who expect liquid stock options. Yet several headwinds could still delay the listing. Regulatory risk remains the biggest unknown, as earlier in 2026 the U.S. administration briefly restricted two of Anthropic's models abroad, and the company has sued the Department of Defense over being placed on a supply-chain risk list. With the prospectus still being finalized, the autumn window looks open, but not yet guaranteed.