Anthropic, one of the leading developers of artificial intelligence, is taking concrete steps toward a stock-market debut that could rank among the biggest ever. Bankers are arranging meetings between the company's executives and prospective investors ahead of a potential initial public offering, CNBC reported. Nothing is confirmed, but the groundwork is being laid.

What is actually happening

An IPO is the process by which a private company first sells shares to the public. The early meetings now under way are a way for the company and its banks to gauge how much investors would pay before committing to a formal offering. Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase are leading the effort, and the company is targeting a debut as soon as October, though the timing could change, according to Bloomberg's account of the plans. Anthropic had already filed a confidential S-1, the main IPO registration document, with the Securities and Exchange Commission on June 1, per reporting on the process. A confidential filing lets a company prepare in private; the document becomes public only if it presses ahead.

The company and the number

Anthropic was founded in 2021 by former OpenAI staff and makes Claude, an AI assistant used widely by businesses and software developers. Its commercial traction has been strong, and reporting around its latest fundraising put its run-rate revenue in the tens of billions of dollars annually, a figure cited by TechCrunch as it covered the round.

The headline figure is the valuation. In May, Anthropic closed a roughly $65 billion funding round that valued it at about $965 billion, according to TechCrunch, a level that, for the first time, put it above rival OpenAI, valued near $852 billion in its most recent round. Those are private-market valuations, set by a handful of large investors; a public listing is a different and more demanding test, because thousands of buyers and sellers, not a few insiders, set the price every day.

Why it matters

A successful Anthropic listing would be a landmark for the AI boom. It would be one of the largest technology IPOs on record, and it would beat OpenAI, the company whose ex-employees founded Anthropic, to the public markets. It would also extend a run of blockbuster debuts, coming after SpaceX went public in June, and would give ordinary investors a rare direct way to buy into a frontier AI lab, rather than reaching it indirectly through a big shareholder such as a cloud provider.

The caveats

For now, restraint is warranted, and the company itself has not confirmed a date. An IPO "as soon as October" is a target, not a commitment; market conditions or strategy could push it back. Private valuations of AI companies are also contested and can move sharply once a stock actually trades, in either direction. The real detail, on revenue, costs, customer concentration and the heavy spending these companies require, will come only if and when Anthropic's prospectus is made public. Until then, this is a company preparing to go public, on terms and a timeline that are not yet fixed. Boursel will report the offering when it is real, rather than handicap it now.