AI company Anthropic filed for an initial public stock offering on Monday, a move that has come earlier than expected and could turn it into the next one to be valued at $1 trillion.
The filing remains confidential as it undergoes revision by the Securities and Exchange Commission reviews. It comes earlier than expected, with NBC News noting that it was expected to being trading in the fall.
"This gives us the option to go public after the SEC completes its review," the company said in a statement. "The number of shares to be offered and the price have not yet been set." The outlet noted that beating OpenAI to the market is key for the company because both companies will be seeking billions in new capital close to each other.
The development comes days after the company overtook OpenAI as the world's most valuable artificial intelligence startup following a Series H round in which it raised $65 billion.
The round, which valued the company at $965 billion, was led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks and Sequoia Capital, Axios noted. The company said the new funding will be used to expand computing capacity, scale its Claude AI products and continue safety and interpretability research.
Anthropic chief financial officer Krishna Rao said in a company statement that the funding would help it respond to growing demand for its AI products and maintain its research efforts.
"This funding will help us serve the historic demand we are experiencing, stay at the research frontier and bring Claude to more of the places where work happens," Rao said.
The company also disclosed that its annualized revenue run rate surpassed $47 billion earlier this month.
Part of the fundraising includes $15 billion in previously committed investments from hyperscale infrastructure partners, including $5 billion from Amazon, the report said. Amazon has become one of Anthropic's biggest backers as competition intensifies among major cloud providers seeking access to leading AI models.
Infrastructure partners participating in the round also included Micron Technology, which recently crossed a $1 trillion market valuation amid rising investor demand for memory chips and AI-related hardware.
Anthropic, founded in 2021 by former OpenAI executives including siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei, has positioned itself as a major rival to OpenAI with a focus on AI safety and enterprise services. Its Claude chatbot competes directly with OpenAI's ChatGPT as well as products from Google and Meta.
