Anthropic IPO vs OpenAI IPO: Can an $800 Billion Valuation Help Anthropic Claim the First Large Model Stock?

TradingKey - Anthropic's $800 billion valuation is the most staggering figure in the global AI investment landscape for April 2026. According to Business Insider, several venture capital firms have proactively approached Claude developer Anthropic with investment offers, with valuations reaching as high as $800 billion—double the $380 billion valuation from its Series G round just two months ago. More remarkably, Anthropic has not yet accepted any new funding, even as Silicon Valley capital clamors for a stake. With the company set to launch its IPO as early as October 2026, the battle for the title of the "first large-model stock"—Anthropic IPO vs. OpenAI IPO—is now fully underway.

Anthropic Profile: From OpenAI "Defectors" to AI Safety Standard-Bearer

In 2021, due to concerns regarding AI safety risks in OpenAI's commercialization, Dario Amodei, then-OpenAI Vice President of Research, and his sister Daniela led seven colleagues to depart San Francisco and found Anthropic. Built upon "Constitutional AI" as its technical cornerstone, the team created the Claude series of large language models, renowned for low hallucination, high controllability, and interpretability.

Unlike OpenAI’s aggressive pursuit of artificial general intelligence, Anthropic has embedded the principles of being "honest, harmless, and grounded" into its product DNA. This differentiated positioning has enabled its rapid rise in enterprise markets with high requirements for safety and compliance—such as finance, law, healthcare, and software development—serving as a core vote of confidence from capital markets in Anthropic’s $800 billion valuation.

Anthropic IPO Progress: $60 Billion Fundraising Could Become Second-Largest IPO in History

The countdown to the Anthropic IPO has begun. According to multiple reports, the company could list in the U.S. as early as October 2026, aiming to raise more than $60 billion—this would make it the world's second-largest IPO after SpaceX.

Listing preparations have been intensive:

• Board Upgrade: Former Microsoft ( MSFT) CFO Chris Liddell, who led General Motors' $23 billion IPO, has joined the board.
• Equity Optimization: A $5 billion to $6 billion employee stock tender offer has been launched to clear structural hurdles for the IPO.
• Underwriting Syndicate: Goldman Sachs ( GS ), JPMorgan ( JPM ), and Morgan Stanley ( MS) are the primary candidate banks.

Market enthusiasm for the Anthropic IPO has already overflowed. On the secondary trading platform Caplight, Anthropic's valuation has reached $688 billion, up 75% from three months ago. This comparison directly leads to the core difference between the Anthropic IPO vs. the OpenAI IPO.

$30 Billion Annualized Revenue: How Anthropic Justifies an $800 Billion Valuation?

On April 7, 2026, Anthropic announced that its annualized revenue surpassed $30 billion, more than tripling from $9 billion at the end of 2025. During the same period, OpenAI's annualized revenue was approximately $25 billion. This marks the first time Anthropic has overtaken its most direct competitor in revenue scale. However, it should be noted that accounting methodologies differ: Anthropic utilizes the gross method (counting the full amount charged to customers as revenue), while OpenAI uses the net method (counting only its share of revenue). If calculated under the same standards, Anthropic's actual revenue scale may still be lower than OpenAI's.

In terms of customer mix, approximately 80% of Anthropic's revenue is derived from enterprise clients, with 8 of the Fortune 10 companies being paying users. The number of enterprise customers with annualized spending exceeding $1 million doubled from 500 in February 2026 to over 1,000 by early April. Regarding profitability, Anthropic expects to achieve positive cash flow as early as 2028, with a cumulative cash burn of approximately $22 billion. Meanwhile, OpenAI's projections indicate that its cumulative losses will exceed $200 billion, with its breakeven point deferred until 2030.

Shifts in market share further corroborate these trends. According to data from the enterprise spend management platform Ramp, Anthropic's share of the enterprise AI market rose from 24.4% to 30.6% in March 2026, a single-month increase of 6.3 percentage points. During the same period, OpenAI's market share declined from approximately 46% to 35.2%, narrowing the gap between the two from 11 to 4.6 percentage points. Following this trajectory, institutions forecast that Anthropic will overtake OpenAI in the enterprise market within the next two months. In direct competition for first-time enterprise AI service buyers, Anthropic's win rate against OpenAI reached 70%. Anthropic already ranks first in market share across the software, finance and insurance, and professional services sectors—the three industries with the highest AI penetration rates of penetration.

Anthropic IPO vs. OpenAI IPO

Anthropic IPO vs OpenAI IPO: One Gaining Momentum, the Other Stumbling

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman privately hopes to "go public before Anthropic," but CFO Sarah Friar has stated clearly that "procedural and organizational work is not yet in place." In August 2025, Friar ceased reporting directly to Altman—an arrangement where the CFO does not report to the CEO is extremely rare in major corporations and has directly slowed down OpenAI's IPO momentum.

For investors, the choice between the Anthropic IPO and the OpenAI IPO has become clear: the former offers a superior risk-reward ratio and a more certain path to profitability, while the latter's valuation already implies excessively high expectations. To support an $852 billion valuation, one would have to assume an IPO valuation exceeding $1.2 trillion—a premise that is increasingly difficult to sustain given that Anthropic provides an alternative with an $800 billion quote.

Computing Power and Regulation: Two "Black Swans" Under an $800 Billion Valuation

Despite the evident divergence in performance, both companies face common industry-wide challenges.

In terms of computing power costs, OpenAI expects its AI computing expenditure to reach $121 billion by 2028. Even if revenue nearly doubles, the company could still lose $85 billion that year, with cumulative losses exceeding $200 billion. Anthropic's inference costs have exceeded internal expectations by 23%, and its gross margin has fallen to approximately 40%. In March 2026, Claude experienced five major outages, exposing bottlenecks in computing power supply. To mitigate this issue, Anthropic reached agreements with Google ( GOOGL) and Broadcom ( AVGO) to lock in approximately 3.5 GW of TPU computing power starting in 2027. Broadcom's CEO disclosed during an earnings call that Anthropic's computing power demand will be around 1 GW in 2026 and will increase to over 3 GW by 2027. Meanwhile, Anthropic plans to invest $50 billion to build data centers in the U.S., with the first sites selected in Texas and New York. CEO Dario Amodei admitted that regarding data center investment, "if we misjudge by a year, it could be catastrophic."

On the regulatory front, in February 2026, the U.S. Department of Defense placed Anthropic on its "supply chain risk" list, prohibiting federal contractors from using its AI models. Anthropic immediately filed a lawsuit, accusing the Pentagon of abuse of power. In March, a federal court in California ruled that the government's action likely exceeded its authority and issued a preliminary injunction; however, on April 8, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit denied Anthropic's request to stay the designation, with oral arguments scheduled for May 19. This unresolved legal dispute brings uncertainty to Anthropic's prospects in the federal market. In contrast, OpenAI reached a cooperation agreement with the Pentagon, allowing its models to be used on the classified networks of defense agencies. The fortunes of the two companies in the government business sector stand in sharp contrast.

Anthropic vs. OpenAI: Which will become the first large model stock?

Starting from an $800 billion valuation bid, Anthropic is approaching an industry-defining IPO race. Regardless of who ultimately rings the listing bell first, investors must focus on three critical variables: the ability to manage computing power costs—controlling capital expenditures without compromising service quality; enterprise customer retention—whether a safety-oriented technical positioning can translate into sustained subscription stickiness; and regulatory navigation—finding a viable equilibrium in the tug-of-war between national security and commercial interests.

For the primary market, Anthropic’s valuation surge is no isolated incident but a microcosm of the shifting dynamics of capital power in the AI sector. The competition is migrating from laboratories to stock exchanges, and market pricing power will ultimately reside with companies capable of demonstrating both growth and profitability.