Anthropic Files $965 Billion IPO With Pentagon Case Pending

Anthropic filed a confidential initial public offering (IPO) prospectus with the Securities and Exchange Commission on June 1, four days after closing a $65 billion funding round that valued the Claude developer at $965 billion. No share count, price range, or listing exchange has been set, per Anthropic’s official filing announcement. An October debut on the Nasdaq or NYSE is the window multiple reports have identified.

What the S-1 begins to test is the market’s appetite for a company whose run-rate revenue grew more than fivefold in five months, with an active federal blacklist still unresolved and a price-to-sales multiple around 20 times.

A $965 Billion Sprint That Took 14 Months

In September 2025, Anthropic was worth $183 billion after closing a $13 billion Series F. February’s Series G pushed that to $380 billion. The funding round that closed on May 28 brought the total to $965 billion, vaulting Anthropic past rival OpenAI, valued at $852 billion in its March fundraise. The revenue trajectory drove every step:

• $87 million annualized run rate, January 2024
• $1 billion run rate, December 2024
• $9 billion run rate, end of 2025
• $14 billion run rate, February 2026
• $47 billion run rate, May 2026

Anthropic disclosed the May figure alongside its funding announcement on May 28. The climb from $9 billion to the May figure in roughly five months gave the round’s underwriters confidence to anchor the deal near a trillion-dollar debut valuation. Salesforce took roughly 20 years to reach $30 billion in annual revenue, per VentureBeat’s April coverage of CEO Dario Amodei’s commentary. Anthropic crossed that mark in under three years from a standing start.

Claude Code and the Enterprise Revenue Engine

The revenue trajectory is largely a single-product story. Claude Code, the company’s agentic coding tool launched publicly in May 2025, reached $1 billion in annualized revenue within six months and was generating over $2.5 billion in run-rate revenue by February 2026, per Anthropic’s Series G funding announcement. Business subscriptions to the product had quadrupled since the start of 2026.

The broader enterprise picture is similarly concentrated. About 80% of Anthropic’s revenue comes from corporate customers, with eight of the Fortune 10 among its clients. Over 1,000 accounts are spending more than $1 million per year on Claude, per TradingKey’s analysis of Anthropic’s investor disclosures. That figure doubled from 500 in February to more than 1,000 by April 2026.

Claude’s broadening enterprise position shows up in the comparative revenue ratios. Despite having a fraction of ChatGPT’s consumer web traffic, Anthropic generates revenue closer to 40% of OpenAI’s run rate, per SaaStr’s analysis, because its billing flows through API contracts with enterprise customers. In April, enterprise AI market share tracked by TradingKey put Anthropic at 34.4%, ahead of OpenAI’s 32.3%, the first time Anthropic had led on that metric.

Who Bet $65 Billion and Why

Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer Investment Group, Greenoaks Capital Partners, and Sequoia Capital led the round, joined by Capital Group, Coatue Management, D1 Capital Partners, GIC (Singapore’s Government Investment Corporation), ICONIQ Growth, and XN. Institutional names including Baillie Gifford, Blackstone, Fidelity, and Temasek filled out the investor list. The round included $15 billion of previously committed hyperscaler investments, among them $5 billion from Amazon.

Samsung and SK Hynix make the high-bandwidth memory that runs Claude’s inference at scale; Micron is the primary alternative supplier. All three joined as “strategic infrastructure partners,” per Anthropic’s Series H announcement, which means their financial return scales directly with Claude’s compute consumption.

This funding will help us serve the historic demand we are experiencing, stay at the research frontier, and bring Claude to more of the places where work happens.

Krishna Rao, Anthropic’s chief financial officer, in the May 28 funding announcement.

The Pentagon Blacklist and the Pending Ruling

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth signed a supply-chain risk designation against Anthropic on February 27, after contract negotiations broke down. Anthropic had refused to accept language permitting Claude to be used for “all lawful purposes,” maintaining its limits against mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons systems. The designation placed Anthropic in the same regulatory category used for foreign companies like Huawei and ZTE. Legal experts cited at the time described it as the first such designation applied to an American company.

Anthropic filed two federal lawsuits on March 9, one in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California and one in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. A California federal judge granted a preliminary injunction blocking broader executive enforcement of the ban. The D.C. Circuit denied an emergency stay in April. Oral arguments before a three-judge panel ran for nearly two hours on May 19. Judge Henderson told lawyers that the DOD’s actions appeared to be “a spectacular overreach,” per CNBC’s reporting on the hearing. A written ruling from the panel was still pending as of June 7.

Commercial revenue kept growing through all of it. The $47 billion run rate came after the blacklist was in place. And as reporting on Anthropic’s NSA arrangement showed, roughly six Anthropic engineers were already embedded at the National Security Agency running the company’s restricted Mythos cybersecurity model under a carve-out from the designation, per Financial Times reporting on June 5.

Pricing the Bet at 20 Times Revenue

At $965 billion against a $47 billion run rate, Anthropic’s implied price-to-sales ratio sits at roughly 20. OpenAI, valued at $852 billion against approximately $25 billion in annualized revenue per TradingKey’s analysis, trades at around 34 times. Both companies are moving toward public listings in what is shaping up as the largest AI IPO wave in technology history.

The 20x multiple is Anthropic’s most favorable number in this comparison, but the company that public investors will see in the full S-1 reported a $5.6 billion operating loss in 2024, per TradingKey’s analysis of investor disclosures. Its own targets are $70 billion in revenue and $17 billion in free cash flow by 2028. OpenAI is not projected to turn a profit until 2030. Fortune reported in early June that Anthropic expects $10.9 billion in Q2 2026 revenue, more than double the prior quarter, and may record its first profitable quarter.

The investors pricing the round are largely the same companies that supply Anthropic’s compute infrastructure, and several sit on its cap table. A valuation anchored by infrastructure providers who stand to collect Anthropic’s spending gives public market investors a number to verify independently once the full S-1 becomes available.

The Compute Loop Beneath the Raise

Fifteen billion of the $65 billion in new capital consists of previously committed hyperscaler investments. The raises also trigger corresponding infrastructure commitments flowing back to investors. Anthropic has committed more than $100 billion over ten years to Amazon Web Services (AWS, Amazon’s cloud computing division) in exchange for up to five gigawatts of compute capacity, per an April infrastructure announcement from Amazon. A separate compute deal with SpaceX set payments at $1.25 billion per month for access to the Colossus 1 data center in Memphis through May 2029, per terms disclosed in SpaceX’s S-1 prospectus and reported by CNBC.

A Google and Broadcom partnership adds further capacity beginning in 2027, with multiple gigawatts of next-generation Tensor Processing Unit (TPU, Google’s custom machine learning chip) capacity committed. Most of the new agreements won’t come online until late 2026 or early 2027, per VentureBeat’s reporting, leaving AWS as the primary dependency in the interim. In March, Anthropic suffered at least five major service outages following intensive product launches, per TradingKey’s analysis, exposing that dependency before the new compute deals are operational.

The public S-1 will eventually show what percentage of revenues recirculates to infrastructure partners. That filing has to land at least 15 days before Anthropic launches a roadshow, whenever that window opens.

Frequently Asked Questions

What Does a Confidential S-1 Mean for the IPO Timeline?

A confidential S-1 lets Anthropic complete its SEC review without public disclosure of financial details. Under SEC rules, the company must file its public prospectus at least 15 days before launching an investor roadshow. No pricing, share count, or listing exchange has been set. Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, and Morgan Stanley are expected to compete for underwriting roles, per Fortune’s reporting on June 1, 2026.

Can Retail Investors Buy Anthropic Shares Before the IPO?

Not through secondary markets, at this point. In May 2026, Anthropic prohibited secondary stock transfers without board approval, warning eight platforms including Forge, Hiive, and Sydecar that transactions would be deemed invalid and not recorded on the company’s books. Forge said it had been “mistakenly listed” and was communicating with Anthropic to have its name removed.

When Is the Anthropic IPO Expected?

Multiple reports target October 2026 on the Nasdaq or New York Stock Exchange. The timeline depends on the SEC completing its review and on prevailing market conditions. OpenAI, which confidentially filed around May 22, is targeting a September 2026 debut. Both companies are preparing for what analysts have described as the most-watched AI public listings in history.

Is Anthropic Currently Profitable?

Anthropic posted a $5.6 billion operating loss in 2024. Fortune reported in early June 2026 that the company expects $10.9 billion in Q2 revenue, more than double the prior quarter, and is on pace for its first profitable quarter. Its stated long-term targets are $70 billion in revenue and $17 billion in free cash flow by 2028.

What Does Anthropic’s PBC Structure Mean for Investors?

Anthropic is incorporated as a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC), a for-profit structure that formally requires the company to balance shareholder returns against broader societal benefit. The full S-1 will detail voting rights and governance structures. Under the PBC charter, leadership retains significant latitude to weigh public benefit factors alongside shareholder interests, which may constrain certain purely profit-maximizing decisions.

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. Investing in initial public offerings involves significant risk, including potential loss of principal. All figures are accurate as of publication date. Readers should consult a qualified financial professional before making any investment decisions.