Anthropic Targets an IPO Bigger Than SpaceX’s Record

Anthropic expects its initial public offering to match or exceed the record set by SpaceX two months ago, according to people familiar with the preparations. SpaceX raised $75 billion in its June debut, a figure that climbed to $86.2 billion once underwriters exercised their overallotment option. Beating it would make the Claude maker the largest first-time share sale in history.

The company has already filed confidentially, and a public registration document could land as soon as the end of August. Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan are leading the listing, with other banks expected to join the roster. Anthropic is also negotiating a revolving credit facility it wants to size above $10 billion.

The financial picture behind the filing is unusual even by frontier-lab standards. Anthropic booked $11.5 billion in revenue in the second quarter of 2026, against $787 million in the same period a year earlier, and turned its first positive adjusted operating income in the process. Annualized revenue reached roughly $65 billion by the end of July. Set against that: a net loss of about $42 billion for 2025, five times the $8.3 billion it lost in 2024.

Valuation is where the reporting gets murkier. Anthropic raised $65 billion in May at a $965 billion valuation. Internal projections put 2028 revenue at $190 billion to $200 billion, numbers the company has used to support a figure closer to $2 trillion. Whether public investors accept that multiple is the open question, and it is worth separating the two figures in circulation: the size of the raise, which is being measured against SpaceX’s $86.2 billion, and the valuation the company is marketed at are different things, and only the first has a firm comparison point.

Anthropic is reportedly weighing super-voting shares for its founders, including chief executive Dario Amodei, who holds roughly 2 percent. That structure would let the founding team keep control through a listing that dilutes them heavily — a pattern familiar from earlier tech debuts, and one that reliably draws objections from governance-focused institutional investors.

There is a small irony in the benchmark. Anthropic buys compute capacity from SpaceX under a multi-billion-dollar, multi-year contract, so the record it is trying to break belongs to one of its own suppliers.

OpenAI has also filed confidentially but is pointing at 2027, which would leave Anthropic first to the public markets among the frontier labs. The timing matters for the broader tape too: U.S. companies that listed in 2026 had raised $160.6 billion as of 19 August, against the 2021 record of $195.2 billion. An Anthropic offering at the scale being discussed would clear that record on its own.

None of this is settled. Confidential filings get pulled, timelines slip, and the gap between an internally modeled $2 trillion and whatever the book actually prices at can be very wide. What has changed is the sequencing — the lab that spent 2026 signing chip and data-center commitments at a pace only a public balance sheet comfortably supports now looks ready to go get one.