Anthropic's IPO could break SpaceX's record

The IPO of Anthropic, American champion of artificial intelligence (AI) and great rival of OpenAI in San Francisco, could beat the record established by SpaceX, American media reported this week. Since June, Elon Musk's space group has held the record for the largest IPO in history, with $85.7 billion raised for a valuation of $1,770 billion. Anthropic “expects to match or exceed” the volume of this operation, Bloomberg reported Thursday.

According to the New York Times on Friday, Anthropic's banks spoke to investors about raising "more than 100 billion dollars" and a valuation of around 2,000 billion. Such capitalization, double that reached after its last funding round in May (965 billion), would raise the five-year-old company to a level surpassed only by a handful of giants with decades of existence, such as Nvidia, Apple or Microsoft. Questioned by AFP on Friday, the company declined to comment.

After a confidential filing in June, the company could publish its listing file, and therefore reveal its accounts for the first time, “in the coming weeks,” says the New York Times. Before an IPO mentioned for the fall. Anthropic would thus be ahead of OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, which made its confidential filing a week later, but is now aiming for a listing in 2027.

Founded in 2021 by dissidents from OpenAI, around siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei, the San Francisco start-up has done well by prioritizing tools intended for developers, such as its programming assistant Claude Code, thus dominating the most profitable AI segment. In the second quarter, its sales more than doubled, to 11.6 billion dollars, exceeding for the first time those of its rival OpenAI (6.7 billion), according to several media.

Like OpenAI, the company remains heavily in deficit: its net losses reached nearly 42 billion in 2025, around five times more than a year before, according to documents consulted by Bloomberg, a consequence of the colossal investments necessary to recruit talent and build giant data centers filled with millions of AI chips.

Anthropic's prices, among the highest on the market, are also under pressure from Chinese open access models, which are much cheaper. A sign of an intensifying price war, OpenAI announced on Friday a drop of more than 20% in the prices of its most powerful model, for three months. Another hazard for future shareholders is the start-up's stormy relations with the Trump administration: in March the government broke all of its contracts with the company, which refused to authorize the Pentagon to use its models for mass surveillance or for lethal autonomous weapons. The dispute is in the hands of justice.