Anthropic, the company behind the Claude chatbot, is discussing going public as early as October 2026 in what bankers expect could be a $60 billion-plus raise, according to Bloomberg and The Information. That would make it the second-largest IPO in history, trailing only SpaceX's expected $75 billion offering. No formal filing exists yet. Timelines shift. But the company has hired Wilson Sonsini as IPO counsel and is in preliminary conversations with Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, and Morgan Stanley about underwriting roles.
All of this comes just weeks after Anthropic closed a $30 billion funding round in February that pegged its valuation at $380 billion. The round was co-led by Singapore sovereign wealth fund GIC and Coatue Management.
The $19 billion question
Anthropic's annualized revenue reportedly topped $19 billion as of early March, more than doubling from $9 billion at the end of 2025. CEO Dario Amodei confirmed the trajectory at a Morgan Stanley conference, attributing much of the acceleration to Claude Code, the company's coding tool that has crossed $2.5 billion in annualized revenue on its own.
Those are striking numbers. They're also potentially misleading.
Here's the issue nobody in the hype cycle wants to talk about: Anthropic and OpenAI account for cloud computing revenue in fundamentally different ways. Anthropic books the full amount of sales made through AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure as its own revenue, then lists the cloud providers' cuts as sales and marketing expenses. OpenAI does the opposite for its Azure sales, recording only its share. Same type of deal, different headline numbers.
Bank of America estimated Anthropic's cloud payments to hyperscale providers could hit $6.4 billion in 2026. If the SEC forces Anthropic to switch to net revenue recognition before listing, that $19 billion figure shrinks considerably.
So what does the SEC do?
Khosla Ventures partner Ethan Choi put it bluntly: if both companies file for IPOs in the coming quarters, the SEC can't realistically let them use different accounting treatments for what is functionally the same revenue stream. Both follow GAAP. Both have defensible interpretations under ASC 606. But investors comparing the two side-by-side will be looking at apples and oranges unless someone blinks.
This isn't a footnote-level concern. It could reshape how Anthropic prices its offering, how underwriters structure the deal, and what multiple investors assign to the stock on day one. A company generating $19 billion gross that becomes $12-13 billion net tells a very different story to institutional allocators, even if the underlying business is identical.
ETFs for a stock that doesn't exist yet
The market is already treating Anthropic's IPO as a foregone conclusion. On March 26, REX Shares and Tuttle Capital Management filed for a 2x leveraged ETF tied to Anthropic's yet-to-be-issued common stock. They filed the same for SpaceX. The T-Rex 2x Long Anthropic Daily Target ETF would deliver 200% of the daily performance of shares that literally do not trade anywhere.
Filing leveraged products on companies that haven't gone public is aggressive even by ETF industry standards. It signals retail investor demand so intense that asset managers are willing to burn through regulatory filings on speculation alone. The SEC still has to approve these products, and there's no guarantee either fund launches.
But the filings themselves are a data point. KraneShares, which runs the only ETF with direct private exposure to Anthropic through its AGIX fund, has seen its Anthropic position appreciate roughly fourfold since early 2025. Secondary market platforms are pricing Anthropic shares at implied valuations north of $500 billion, well above the $380 billion from the February round.
The race nobody admits is a race
Anthropic isn't the only AI company eyeing public markets before year-end. OpenAI closed a $120 billion funding round at an $850 billion valuation in March, and the Wall Street Journal has reported it hopes to list ahead of Anthropic. SpaceX advisers were reportedly preparing a prospectus filing as early as late March, targeting a June listing.
If all three go public, they'd represent the three largest venture-backed IPOs ever, with a combined private valuation above $2 trillion. Bloomberg has estimated their public debuts could add more than $3 trillion to U.S. equity market capitalization.
For Anthropic specifically, the competitive math is straightforward. It generates $0.23 in annual recurring revenue per dollar raised, compared to OpenAI's $0.11, according to Morningstar data cited by WinBuzzer. Eight Fortune 10 companies are Claude customers. Enterprise clients account for roughly 80% of revenue. The business case is solid, assuming you trust the revenue figures, which brings us back to the accounting question.
October is six months away. A lot can change: market conditions, SEC scrutiny, the ongoing Pentagon dispute over AI safeguards. But the bankers are circling, the ETF issuers are filing, and Anthropic's revenue trajectory keeps accelerating. Whether the headline number survives contact with SEC auditors is the $60 billion question.
