Daniela Amodei, co-founder and president of Anthropic, in San Francisco, California on May 9, 2024.David Paul Morris/Bloomberg/Getty ImagesAnthropic’s S-1 filing
on Monday was confidential, but there’s much we already know about the $965 billion AI juggernaut.
The nearly trillion-dollar startup has gotten so big that it’s hard to hide in the markets the way a growth-spurting elephant is hard to hide in a zoo.
Back when our AI editor Jeremy Kahn wrote his
Fortune cover story on Anthropic in December 2025, the company—
founded in 2021 and helmed by siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei—was valued at $183 billion. No longer.
Anthropic’s annualized revenue run rate hit $47 billion in May, and while that’s no guarantee of the future, it is astonishing. Competition for Anthropic secondary shares has been rabid,
as I’ve previously reported. There is some speculation that if Anthropic makes it to the public markets before OpenAI, it could dampen demand for its less profitable rival.
A vital caveat: A confidential S-1 is still a maybe. We have no real numbers yet, and timing remains touch-and-go. Anthropic could go public this summer, this fall, or never.
Nevertheless, it’s very much a signal the company wants to send loud and clear: Anthropic intends to beat OpenAI to the public markets.
Now it’s OpenAI’s move. That company could motor to file and try to leapfrog Anthropic this summer. How SpaceX fares may be a factor, too.
We may already know quite a bit about Anthropic. If the company continues following the IPO path, we will soon learn a lot more.
—Allie Garfinkle