Key Takeaways
- Anthropic confidentially filed a draft S-1 with the SEC on June 1, 2026, becoming the first major AI lab to formally begin an IPO process.
- The filing followed a $65 billion Series H that closed on May 28 at a $965 billion post-money valuation, making Anthropic the most valuable private AI company, narrowly ahead of OpenAI.
- Annualized revenue reached about $47 billion by May 2026, up from $9 billion at the end of 2025, a fivefold rise in roughly five months.
- Anthropic is projected to post its first profitable quarter in Q2 2026, with about $10.9 billion in revenue and roughly $559 million in operating profit.
- Against OpenAI, Anthropic carries nearly double the revenue run rate while approaching profitability years earlier.
- Anthropic generates about $0.36 of annual revenue per dollar raised, against roughly $0.14 for OpenAI, a sharp efficiency gap.
- Roughly 80% of revenue comes from business customers, with eight of the Fortune 10 and more than 1,000 firms spending over $1 million a year.
- A listing is targeted for around October 2026, led by Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan.
AI safety and robustness – conceptual image. Image credit: Anthropic
Anthropic filed first, and that order of events is the story. On June 1, 2026, the maker of Claude confidentially submitted a draft S-1 to the SEC, beating OpenAI to the punch and becoming the first frontier lab to start down the public-market road. The filing arrived four days after a $65 billion Series H closed at a $965 billion valuation, pushing Anthropic past OpenAI in private worth for the first time. The company framed the move carefully, saying the draft gives it the option to go public once the SEC finishes its review, with no share count, price, or date set.
Against the other AI names heading to market, Anthropic occupies a distinct position: smaller and younger than OpenAI, yet running a higher revenue rate and nearing profit. Where OpenAI loses about $1.22 for every dollar it earns and SpaceX bundles a profitable Starlink with loss-making space and AI segments, Anthropic is on track for a clean profitable quarter built almost entirely on enterprise demand. That combination is what sets the terms of any comparison.
The revenue trajectory that defines the filing
Anthropic’s growth curve is the headline number. The company moved from roughly $1 billion in annualized revenue at the start of 2025 to $9 billion by year-end, then to $14 billion in February 2026, $30 billion in April, and about $47 billion by May. The jump from $9 billion to $30 billion took about four months. For scale, Salesforce needed roughly two decades to reach $30 billion in annual revenue; Anthropic covered similar ground in under three years from a standing start.
That climb came without a large consumer base. ChatGPT still dwarfs Claude on app usage by roughly 18 to 1, yet Anthropic monetizes each user far harder, earning an estimated several hundred dollars per active app user per year against roughly $20 for OpenAI. The difference is structural: Anthropic built on enterprise API contracts and cloud deals from the start, and Claude is the only frontier model available across AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. Much of that enterprise pull comes from coding, where Claude leads on tasks like multi-file refactoring and complex debugging.
Anthropic against OpenAI, head to head
The two companies picked the same underwriting team and the same IPO window, which makes each filing a reference point for the other. On revenue run rate, Anthropic leads. On profitability, the gap is starker. Anthropic is projected to deliver about $559 million in operating profit on $10.9 billion of Q2 2026 revenue, a single quarter that exceeds its entire 2025 revenue. OpenAI, by contrast, expects roughly $14 billion in operating losses for 2026 against about $13 billion in revenue, with breakeven not forecast until around 2030.
Capital efficiency widens the contrast. Anthropic generates about $0.36 in annual revenue per dollar raised, against roughly $0.14 for OpenAI, and produces several times the revenue per employee, helped by an API-first model that needs less support staff than a consumer operation serving hundreds of millions of weekly users. In a Benzinga poll, investors preferred Anthropic over OpenAI three to one as the AI stock they would most want to own, driven by that profit trajectory.
| Measure | Anthropic | OpenAI |
|---|---|---|
| Confidential S-1 filed | June 1, 2026 | Announced June 8, 2026 |
| Valuation | $965 billion | ~$852 billion (private) |
| Revenue run rate | ~$47 billion (May 2026) | ~$24 billion |
| Profitability | First profit expected Q2 2026 | ~2030 |
| Revenue per dollar raised | ~$0.36 | ~$0.14 |
| Revenue mix | ~80% enterprise | More consumer-weighted |
| Listing target | ~October 2026 | Late 2026 or 2027 |
Where SpaceX fits the comparison
SpaceX is the third member of this IPO cluster, having gone public on June 12 near a $2 trillion market cap, but it is a different kind of asset. Its AI arm, built from the absorbed xAI, generates a fraction of Anthropic’s revenue and large losses, and there is an unusual link between the two companies: part of Anthropic’s near-term profit reflects a ramp-up discount on a compute deal under which it took over capacity at xAI’s Colossus 1 data center. Anthropic itself has cautioned that this profitability may not hold, a candor that matters for public investors reading the filing.
The risks public buyers will weigh
The biggest near-term risk is regulatory. In June 2026, Anthropic said the U.S. government directed it to suspend access to its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models for foreign nationals, including foreign-national employees, forcing the company to disable those models for all customers to stay compliant. Access to other models was unaffected, but the episode shows how export controls on frontier models can hit availability and revenue without warning, an investor risk now made concrete ahead of a listing. The company’s heavy compute commitments add a second variable, since serving frontier models at scale depends on the same scarce resource every lab fights for, a dynamic explored in our guide to AI infrastructure.
What to watch next
The confidential filing is a signal, not a security. There is no public way to buy Anthropic today, no price, and no firm date. The event that matters is the public S-1, where the risk factors and the detail on compute commitments and margins will carry more weight than the headline valuation. How Anthropic discloses those figures will set the template every other frontier lab is measured against. With Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX all in front of investors within weeks of each other, the order of filings has handed Anthropic the narrative lead, and its profit trajectory is the number rivals now have to answer. This is informational reporting, not investment advice.
If you are interested in this topic, we suggest you check our articles:
- xAI vs OpenAI vs Anthropic: Which AI Lab Wins in 2026?
- AI Models and Their Features: ChatGPT vs Grok vs Claude
- Best Tasks for Claude Code vs OpenAI Codex
- Does OpenAI Want Over 300,000 AI Consultants?
- AI Infrastructure: Essential Components in Modern ML Systems
Sources: Fortune, SmartAsset, IG, SaaStr, New Market Pitch
Written by Alius Noreika
