Anthropic Locks in Nasdaq for IPO Preparation
Anthropic has selected the Nasdaq as the listing venue for its initial public offering (IPO), aiming to complete the listing by October 2026. The relevant prospectus has been submitted confidentially to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
In terms of financing background, Anthropic recently completed a $65 billion funding round (Series H) on May 28, with a post-money valuation reaching $965 billion. This is the latest publicly disclosed benchmark for the company's private valuation, and the pricing for the IPO will directly reference this benchmark.
According to market expectations, the valuation for this listing could be pushed up to nearly $2 trillion, more than double the private valuation from May; if realized, it would place Anthropic among the largest tech company IPOs in recent years.
This year, Nasdaq has already hosted the listing of SpaceX, which was valued at $1.75 trillion, making it one of the few heavyweight tech stock issuances this year. If Anthropic successfully completes its listing, Nasdaq will have secured the two largest tech company IPO transactions globally within the same year.
It is noteworthy that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman previously stated that, for safety and alignment reasons, OpenAI "will not go public in 2026," believing that the current time is not suitable; meanwhile, Anthropic is advancing its listing plan in the same month, with both leading labs making starkly opposite capital market decisions based on nearly identical industry conditions.
From a market mechanism perspective, this IPO means that institutional investors (including hedge funds, sovereign funds, and mutual funds) who could only enter through private rounds will now have access to the public market. Given that valuation expectations have already been "discussed" in the $2 trillion range, existing shareholders in the primary market (including Amazon, Google, and other previous investors) may have motives to partially exit or realize valuations through the listing window, while new public market funds are betting on Anthropic's continued penetration in the enterprise AI market. The pressure point is OpenAI, which has publicly stated it will delay its IPO; if Anthropic's post-listing valuation is validated by the market, it will directly raise external pressure on the pricing reference for OpenAI's subsequent financing.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
Anthropic was founded in 2021 by siblings Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei after leaving OpenAI, with a core team largely composed of former OpenAI safety and alignment researchers. From its inception, the company adopted a governance structure called "Long-Term Benefit Trust," which allocates some board seats to non-shareholder entities, a design seen as a direct response to the "OpenAI-style governance failure." Now, as it races towards a trillion-dollar IPO, this unique governance structure will be subjected to public market investor pricing scrutiny for the first time.
In terms of capital pathways, Amazon has previously committed over $8 billion to Anthropic, while Google's cumulative investment has also reached several billion dollars. The funding from these two cloud providers essentially represents a "compute-for-equity" exchange—Anthropic trades equity for cloud computing quotas from AWS and Google Cloud, thereby binding the exclusive supply relationship for next-generation AI workloads. This $65 billion Series H round and the subsequent IPO follow the same logic: the cost of compute for training next-generation cutting-edge models has exceeded what traditional private rounds and venture capital can cover, necessitating the scale of public capital markets.
Historically, this is similar to how Amazon and Microsoft secured customers through capital expenditures during the cloud computing era, and akin to Nvidia's valuation leap during a compute shortage cycle. The fact that Nasdaq is welcoming both SpaceX ($1.75 trillion) and Anthropic (potentially $2 trillion) in the same year indicates that the two most capital-intensive frontier technology sectors, "space + AI," have reached a stage where they must rely on public market funding for expansion, transitioning the industry from "private giant cultivation" to the next cycle of "public market valuation verification."
Essentially, this is a typical case of capital concentration: the training costs of cutting-edge AI models continue to rise according to the law of scale, leading to a narrowing number of players able to remain at the table, forcing capital to concentrate in a few leading labs. Mechanically, when even the funding scale of private rounds (even at $65 billion) cannot cover the compute gap for the next-generation models, going public becomes the only channel for sustained funding. OpenAI's decision to avoid this path concurrently objectively allows Anthropic to "sprint" in the public capital market to establish a valuation anchor. Once this anchor is established, it will inversely influence the pricing logic for all subsequent private financing and potential IPOs in the entire AI industry.
ABAB News · Cognitive Law
Compute eats profits, capital eats compute, and in the end, only those who can go public remain.
When others fear the IPO window, the one that charges ahead takes the valuation anchor.
Private rounds nurture giants, but the public market is the ultimate judge of valuation.