Startups

Anthropic lines up investor meetings for a potential October IPO

Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan are scheduling pre-IPO sit-downs for the Claude maker, which could beat OpenAI to the public markets by at least a year.

By Giulia Donatello · Startups & funding · 2026-07-15 · 3 min read

Photo: Unsplash / Nicholas Cappello — The facade of the New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street, draped with an American flag.

Anthropic’s underwriters are scheduling pre-IPO investor meetings in the coming weeks, per Bloomberg, positioning the Claude maker for a public listing as soon as October. Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and JPMorgan Chase, the three biggest Wall Street banks by revenue, are running the process, CNBC reports. An Anthropic spokesperson declined to comment.

The listing would follow a confidential S-1 filing the company submitted to the SEC last month. It would also, on the current timeline, beat OpenAI to the tape by at least a year: OpenAI made its own confidential filing in June 2026 and has since disclosed nothing further. For a company founded in 2021 by researchers and executives who defected from OpenAI over concerns about the company’s direction, that sequencing carries a certain narrative weight.

The financials explain the appetite. Anthropic’s revenue run rate reached $4 billion in July 2025, $9 billion by late 2025, and $30 billion earlier this spring. In late May the company said it had crossed $47 billion, a jump from the $30 billion mark in less than two months. Enterprise adoption is doing most of the work, with Claude Code, the company’s coding assistant, functioning as the wedge product into large customers.

The valuation has kept pace. Anthropic’s $65 billion round in May closed at a $965 billion post-money valuation, edging past OpenAI’s $852 billion for the first time. Around the same window, Andrej Karpathy, an OpenAI co-founder and one of the best-known AI researchers in the world, joined Anthropic’s pre-training team. Capital, talent, and now bankers are all pointing the same direction.

An October listing would land in a public market already primed by SpaceX’s June IPO, which reopened the window for private-company-of-record names that had spent years insisting they didn’t need it. The pattern is familiar from earlier cycles: the largest holdouts go last, and they go together. What’s different this time is the run-rate slope. The banks aren’t selling a story about future revenue. They’re selling a chart.

Sources