Anthropic beats OpenAI to confidential IPO filing as rivalry shapes AI's future

Anthropic Jumps Ahead in the Race to Go Public

Anthropic has filed confidentially for an IPO, marking a decisive move in the intensifying battle for the future of AI between the company and its chief rival, OpenAI 1

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. The confidential IPO filing came on June 1, following a $65 billion fundraise at a $965 billion valuation that was heavily oversubscribed 1

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. OpenAI followed with its own S-1 paperwork submission just one week later, targeting a valuation around $1 trillion 2

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. The companies are racing to beat one another to market, viewing the first listing as a way to frame how investors will value the companies and establish their CEO as the leading voice of AI 2

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Co-founder Daniela Amodei, speaking at the Bloomberg Tech conference, explained that the decision to pursue an AI IPO comes down to capital needs. "It's a really big upfront cost to train the models and to serve inference on them," she said, adding that frontier companies "are just going to need access to capital, and I think the public market is very well suited to that" 1

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. Anthropic's annualized revenue crossed $47 billion in May, up dramatically from roughly $9 billion at the end of 2025 1

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Anthropic vs OpenAI: A Rivalry Driving the Generative AI Boom

The fierce competition between Anthropic and OpenAI has fundamentally shaped AI development. In late 2022, when OpenAI caught wind that Anthropic was working on an AI-powered chatbot, CEO Sam Altman immediately directed employees to fast-track a competing product 2

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. Two weeks later, the company released ChatGPT, sparking the generative AI boom that promises to overhaul the global economy 2

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. "It's all-out war between these guys," said Anastasios Angelopoulos, CEO of Arena, a top AI benchmarking and evaluation company. "Every time there's a new release from Anthropic, the bet will be that OpenAI is soon to follow and vice versa" 2

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The tension between Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, a former OpenAI researcher who was instrumental in developing the core technology behind ChatGPT, is influencing how quickly AI tools are released, what features they include, and how people interact with the technology in their daily lives 2

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. Bankers and advisers are navigating increasingly complex relationships with both companies, with some banks erecting internal barriers between deal teams to prevent information leaks as executives at both firms press for insight into their rival's plans 2

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Contrasting AI Strategy: Lean Spending vs Aggressive Expansion

Daniela Amodei has charted a distinctly leaner AI strategy compared to OpenAI's aggressive expansion. While OpenAI has projected as much as $600 billion in compute spending by 2030, Anthropic expects to spend roughly one-third of that amount 4

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. "We would much prefer to be on the side of having a little bit more demand for the product than we're able to serve than the inverse," Amodei explained, emphasizing the company's deliberate approach to securing compute capacity 1

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Anthropic has partnered with xAI for compute capacity, a deal disclosed in SpaceX's S-1 filing to cost $1.25 billion per month 1

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. The company has prioritized enterprise use cases and coding over mass-market consumer engagement, contrasting with OpenAI where more than 70 percent of ChatGPT usage is tied to personal tasks 4

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. "The difference in our consumer product compared to competitors is that we're not an entertainment tool. It's really for productive activities, whether those are at work or at home," Amodei said 4

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Revenue Recognition Dispute Reveals Deeper Tensions

The companies are also clashing over how each tells its financial story to investors. OpenAI has told investors and employees that Anthropic's preferred accounting method overstates its revenue by billions of dollars 2

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. In April, OpenAI's chief revenue officer Denise Dresser told employees that OpenAI considers Anthropic's financials inflated, according to a company memo 2

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. Anthropic books the full amount that customers pay for its AI services as revenue, while part of that sum is later routed to partners such as Amazon and Google. OpenAI uses a different method, reporting only net revenue after paying its partner, Microsoft 5

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Anthropic told Reuters that it follows established accounting practices and recognizes gross revenue because it is the "principal" in the transaction while its cloud partners are distribution channels 2

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. Gil Luria, analyst at D.A. Davidson, noted that "Anthropic to try to beat OpenAI out to the public market is that they will get to set the agenda for how a frontier model reports financials and do so in a way that is favorable to their financial model" 2

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AI Risks vs Rapid Expansion: The Contradiction

Both Anthropic and OpenAI have spent recent weeks publishing papers warning that frontier AI is advancing faster than regulation can keep up, even as they filed S-1 paperwork and launched their most powerful AI models yet 3

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. Anthropic published a paper titled "When AI builds itself," calling for a coordinated "slowdown or pause" in frontier model development across countries 3

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. The company disclosed that as of May 2026, more than 80% of code merged into its own codebase was written by Claude, its AI model, not by human engineers 3

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Meanwhile, Anthropic released Claude Fable 5, a "Mythos-class" model described as its most capable ever made publicly available, while OpenAI released GPT-5.5 in late April 3

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. Going public would subject both companies to quarterly earnings pressure, a force that historically pushes technology firms toward growth at any cost, making it difficult to reconcile calls for coordinated slowdowns in AI development with the mechanics of publicly traded companies expected to hit revenue targets every three months 3

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. Despite concerns from companies like Uber that not all AI spending has proven productive, Amodei remains confident that businesses are still early in figuring out how to deploy AI effectively, expecting use cases in coding, financial services, legal, and health care to continue driving efficiency 1

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