Why did Anthropic and OpenAI announce their intention to enter the stock market soon?
On Monday, OpenAI filed to go public on the US stock market. The announcement was made on company's blogpost.
Currently valued at a level of 852 billion of dollars after an outstanding raise of funds in April 2026, OpenAI looks set to become one of the largest IPOs in history. At the same time, its rival Anthropic filed as well for a public stock offering on June 1. Shortly before its IPO filing, the company had closed a funding round at a $965 billion valuation, topping OpenAI's.
What looks at first, a basic move shall be remember as an historical day. Indeed, two top AI organisations are about to enter stock market. A striking signal of how fast the AI race is now spilling into public markets.
About OpenAI
OpenAI was initially funded as a non-profit organisation with the goal of ensuring that artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. The company's founding focus was on advancing AI safely through open, high-quality research, while also democratising access by sharing results, tools, and code.
Over the years, it has gradually evolved into a for-profit organisation, now led by Sam Altman. Recently, the enterprise faced trial by former partners, including Elon Musk, one of the founding partners, who considered that OpenAI deviated from its initial mission.
OpenAI is also behind ChatGPT, their conversational AI app launched in November 2022, which launched the AI race as we know it today.
About Anthropic
Anthropic is OpenAI's main American rival, founded in 2021 by seven former OpenAI employees. It distinguishes itself through AI safety, which sits at the core of its mission rather than as a secondary concern. The company was built on the premise that powerful AI systems must be developed cautiously, with interpretability, alignment, and responsible scaling as central pillars of its strategy rather than an afterthought to product growth.
With Dario Amodei as CEO, Anthropic has released multiple Claude models, each tailored to different needs — from lightweight, fast models for everyday tasks to more powerful ones for complex reasoning, coding, and enterprise use cases.
Recently, Anthropic has overtaken OpenAI in revenue, reaching a $30 billion run-rate versus OpenAI's roughly $24-25 billion in April 2026.
What does it mean for AI investors?
After many rounds of funding, investors had long expected that, sooner or later, these companies would file for a public stock offering. Both are now nearing $1 trillion in valuation, placing Anthropic and OpenAI among the most valuable private enterprises ever to approach the public markets.
This move reassures many investors, who consider this increase in funds to be largely circular: investments come from chip suppliers like Nvidia, which invests in OpenAI partly in return for OpenAI's chip purchases. This creates a closed loop that some investors view as artificially inflating the round.
Others believe that OpenAI and Anthropic underestimate the operating costs of producing models powerful enough to meet enterprise needs, while simultaneously overestimating the revenue these AI activities will generate.
More importantly, by entering the stock market, both companies will be subjected to far greater public scrutiny — quarterly earnings, financial transparency, and valuation discipline from a broader pool of shareholders. The filings come as both firms seek to raise enormous amounts of capital to fund AI infrastructure, so investors will be watching closely whether public markets can absorb capital raises of this scale.
Ultimately, this scrutiny will help separate genuine value creation from artificially inflated growth. Whether public markets can comfortably absorb capital raises of this magnitude will serve as a real-time test of investor confidence in AI's long-term economic promise — and may finally reveal whether the current boom rests on solid fundamentals or on a fragile, self-reinforcing cycle of investment among a small group of interconnected players.