Anthropic IPO Date: What Investors Need to Know Before It Prices
Key Points
Anthropic could go public by the end of the year.
But investors should scrutinize its S-1 filing to see if its business model is sustainable.
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Anthropic, one of the world's fastest-growing AI companies, announced on June 1 that it had filed a confidential Form S-1 with the SEC for its planned IPO. It could price its offering by the end of the year, and it's reportedly targeting a valuation of $2 trillion -- which would surpass SpaceX's (NASDAQ: SPCX) $1.77 trillion to become the biggest IPO in history. That's more than double the valuation of $965 billion it reached after its last private funding round in May.
Should investors chase Anthropic's eagerly anticipated IPO, or should they wait for the initial hype to die down? Let's see what investors should know before it goes public.
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Anthropic is growing like a weed, but its profitability is questionable
Anthropic's annualized run rate exceeded $65 billion at the end of July, compared to roughly $9 billion at the end of 2025. That explosive growth was driven by the increased adoption of Claude (its family of large language models and AI assistants) among enterprise customers, the integration of its application programming interfaces (APIs) into other applications, and its cloud infrastructure partnerships with Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) Web Services (AWS) and Alphabet's (NASDAQ: GOOG) (NASDAQ: GOOGL) Google Cloud.
Amazon and Alphabet both hold double-digit stakes in Anthropic, so its upcoming IPO could significantly boost their profits. Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) has also reportedly been mulling a $10 billion investment in Anthropic's IPO to fortify its software optimization partnership and supply chain ties.
Anthropic claims it was profitable on an "adjusted" basis in the second quarter of 2026 and expects to remain profitable in the third quarter. However, it's unclear what that "adjusted" figure actually includes.
Without seeing its S-1 filing, we should assume that it's still unprofitable by generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) metrics -- which will include all of the equipment depreciation, interest expenses, revenue-sharing deals (with Amazon and Google), and model training costs that might have been scrubbed from its "adjusted" profits.
Safety concerns could drive away its investors
Anthropic's co-founder and CEO, Dario Amodei, recently called for a slowdown in AI development to set up more rigorous safety measures. Anthropic's chief competitor, OpenAI, has also cited similar concerns and postponed its own IPO plans.
That shift suggests that Anthropic might not be comfortable launching its IPO by the end of this year. If it goes through with its IPO, it could struggle to justify its high price tag. A $2 trillion, the company would be valued at 31 times its last known annualized revenue run rate. Rising interest rates could compress those valuations and highlight its debt and losses. So instead of assuming Anthropic's stock will skyrocket once it goes public, we should carefully scrutinize its S-1 filing to assess whether its business model is sustainable.
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Leo Sun has positions in Amazon. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Alphabet, Amazon, and Nvidia. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
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