OpenAI and Anthropic Race Toward a Trillion-Dollar IPO

In the first week of June 2026, the two most valuable private AI labs in the world both moved one step closer to the public market. On June 1, Anthropic confirmed that it had confidentially submitted a draft registration statement, the legal first step toward an initial public offering. One week later, on June 8, OpenAI said it had done the same. For the first time, two frontier AI model companies are racing to ring the bell on a major stock exchange in the same quarter.

The numbers behind the race are striking. Anthropic's most recent private funding round, completed earlier in 2026, valued the company at close to one trillion dollars on a fully diluted basis. OpenAI's March funding round, worth 122 billion dollars, lifted its post-money valuation to roughly 850 billion dollars, with bankers widely expecting the IPO itself to push the figure toward one trillion. Both companies are bringing in tens of billions of dollars in annual revenue, yet both are still spending more cash than they earn, mainly on compute, chips, and talent.

Why go public now? Each side gives a slightly different answer. Anthropic points to its fast-growing enterprise business and what it calls a "safety-first" product line, especially the Claude family used by software engineers. The company has guided to its first quarter of operating profit in 2026, a milestone that investors usually demand before pricing an IPO. OpenAI, by contrast, leans on the global reach of ChatGPT and a much larger consumer footprint. In the same week as the filing, its leadership laid out a three-year plan that wraps models, agents, and an "AI super-app" into a single product vision.

Going public will also change both companies in ways the labs may not fully control. A public S-1 prospectus will, for the first time, lay out their real cost structure, customer concentration, and the scale of compute commitments they have signed. Existing employees and early investors will eventually hit a lockup expiry, after which a large block of shares can hit the market. The market will also start pricing dilution, governance, and quarterly guidance in ways private markets never did. Whichever of the two firms lists first, the broader signal is clear: the era of frontier AI as a purely private business is closing, and the public markets are about to take a direct seat at the table.