Anthropic Could Beat OpenAI to Wall Street by Over a Year

With the world a few years into the AI gold rush, frontier labs OpenAI and Anthropic are ramping up their plans to go public. OpenAI first flirted with the idea earlier this year, setting an initial target for late 2026. It has since pushed back its planned IPO to 2027, and Anthropic has taken another step closer by putting together its IPO prospectus.

Releasing an IPO prospectus -- which provides a detailed dive into a company's financial standing and business outlook -- is a major step on the road to an IPO. After eyeing a late 2026 time frame, it now looks like Anthropic could beat OpenAI to the punch by quite a bit, according to the prospectus, which Reuters reporters have gotten access to.

Both OpenAI and Anthropic are aiming to go public with valuations as high as $2 trillion. If it happened today, it would make either company the world's seventh most valuable public company, just ahead of Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX), which set a new IPO valuation record on June 12, when it debuted with a market cap of $1.77 trillion.

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Big spending plans ahead for Anthropic

Anthropic's IPO prospectus showed what many expected: fast-growing revenue and large losses. Last year, its revenue jumped 1,050% year over year to $4.6 billion, but its operating loss (losses from core operations) widened to $8.06 billion from $5.08 billion in 2024.

It technically had an on-paper net loss of $42 billion, but $34 billion of that was from accounting charges, so I wouldn't hold that against its business too much.

Like many other big-name tech companies right now, Anthropic is spending heavily on building AI infrastructure and buying compute power from cloud providers like Amazon (AWS) and Alphabet (Google Cloud) to keep training and scaling its Claude models. It spent $7.33 billion on that in 2025, accounting for 58% of all its operating expenses.

Anthropic says it plans to spend $518 billion on infrastructure and computing power in the coming years, which is staggering, to say the least.

Anthropic could be the trial run

Assuming Anthropic beats OpenAI to the public market, it will be everyday investors' first chance to invest in a pure-play AI frontier lab (a company that creates state-of-the-art AI models). That's likely to come with a lot of interest and even more scrutiny -- especially if its valuation is close to the $2 trillion mark.

During a private funding round in March, OpenAI raised $122 billion at a $852 billion valuation for the company, so it may be less pressed to rush to join the public market and take on everything that comes with that. Whether it's having to deliver quarterly earnings reports that please Wall Street or facing increased regulatory scrutiny, OpenAI can kick the can down the road a bit if it wants to.

This isn't to say Anthropic needs to go public right now -- it has $20.28 billion in cash, cash equivalents, and short-term investments on its books -- but it does have a lot of incentive to do so.

Stefon Walters has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Alphabet and Amazon. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.