Anthropic, OpenAI and the AI-Lab IPO Wave

Anthropic has confidentially filed for an IPO and OpenAI has cleared the structural path to one. The frontier model labs now face the gap between private valuations near $1 trillion and the cash burn of training their models.

Anthropic confidentially submitted a draft S-1 to the Securities and Exchange Commission on June 1, 2026, according to the company’s own statement, becoming the first frontier artificial intelligence lab to formally start the process of going public. The filing arrived days after Anthropic closed a $65 billion Series H round at a $965 billion post-money valuation, a figure that put it within reach of the $1 trillion mark and, per Bloomberg, ahead of OpenAI as the most valuable AI startup. Anthropic stressed that no share count or price has been set and that any offering “will depend on market conditions and other factors.” That single confidential filing has crystallized a question hanging over the sector: are the companies building frontier models actually ready for public markets, or are private valuations running well ahead of the businesses underneath them?

Anthropic’s path to the public market

Anthropic’s confidential draft submission was made under standard SEC review procedures, which let late-stage companies begin the IPO process without immediately disclosing revenue, margins, or risk factors to the public. The company framed it as optionality rather than a commitment, saying the step “gives us the option to go public after the SEC completes its review.”

The financial backdrop is unusual for a company this young. Anthropic said its run-rate revenue crossed $47 billion earlier in May 2026, driven by enterprise adoption of Claude for coding and agentic workflows. The Series H was led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, and Sequoia Capital, and included $15 billion in previously committed hyperscaler investment, with Amazon contributing $5 billion. TechCrunch reported the round was widely seen as Anthropic’s likely final private raise before a listing. The broader reopening of the US listing window has made that timing plausible, a shift we covered in the 2026 US IPO market reopening.

OpenAI cleared the structure, not the runway

OpenAI’s situation is the mirror image: it spent 2025 fixing the corporate structure that had blocked a conventional IPO, but has not committed to one. On October 28, 2025, the company completed its conversion into a public benefit corporation called OpenAI Group PBC, controlled by the renamed OpenAI Foundation. Per Bloomberg’s explainer and Built In, the Foundation holds roughly 26% of the for-profit entity, Microsoft holds about 27% with exclusive API rights but no governance power, and the restructuring removed earlier caps on how much OpenAI could raise.

That last point matters more than the equity splits. Removing the profit cap and the nonprofit’s hard control was the prerequisite for any public offering. What it did not do was settle the timing. Reports through early 2026 suggested OpenAI’s own finance leadership floated delaying any listing toward 2027, citing operational readiness, while Elon Musk’s lawsuit challenging the for-profit conversion went to trial in late April 2026, adding a legal overhang. OpenAI has the structure for an IPO. It has not signaled it wants one soon.

Private valuations versus the cost of building models

The tension that public markets will test is the distance between these valuations and the cash these companies consume. OpenAI’s internal forecasts, as reported by the-decoder, point to a cumulative cash burn of roughly $665 billion through 2030, about $111 billion more than an earlier projection, with the company not expecting to turn cash-flow positive until around 2030. A separate report cited by Yahoo Finance put OpenAI’s projected 2026 loss near $14 billion even as it targets roughly $100 billion in revenue by 2029.

The driver is compute. Training and serving frontier models is among the most capital-intensive activities in technology, and the bill rises with each model generation. OpenAI President Greg Brockman has said the company expects to spend around $50 billion on computing in 2026 alone, per the-decoder. That spending flows downstream to chipmakers, a dynamic visible in the strong demand for AI silicon offerings such as the one we examined in the Cerebras AI-chip IPO. The labs and the hardware suppliers are financially intertwined, which means a public investor buying a model company is also buying exposure to a compute build-out measured in hundreds of billions of dollars.

What public-market discipline would demand

A confidential S-1 is a long way from a printed prospectus. To complete an offering, Anthropic would have to disclose audited financials, gross margins, and risk factors, the very figures the confidential process lets it withhold for now. Public investors price growth, but they also price the path to profitability, and a company burning billions annually on training runs has to show that revenue scales faster than compute costs do. Anthropic has reportedly told investors it aims for break-even as early as 2028, a more aggressive target than OpenAI’s, which would, if met, give it a cleaner equity story.

There is also the question of who else follows. The 2026 listing window has already absorbed enormous deals, from SpaceX’s record public debut to oversubscribed AI hardware offerings, which suggests appetite exists for scale. Whether that appetite extends to pre-profit model labs, whose costs are still climbing, is the test the first AI-lab IPO will set for every lab behind it. Anthropic filed first. The market’s reaction, if and when its S-1 goes public, will shape the terms for OpenAI and the rest.

FAQ

Has Anthropic actually filed to go public?

Anthropic confidentially submitted a draft S-1 to the SEC on June 1, 2026, according to the company. That starts the regulatory review process and gives Anthropic the option to list later, but it is not a commitment. No price, share count, or date has been set, and the company said any offering depends on market conditions.

Is OpenAI planning an IPO in 2026?

OpenAI completed the restructuring in October 2025 that makes a traditional IPO possible, converting to a public benefit corporation controlled by the OpenAI Foundation. It has not confirmed an IPO date, and reports suggest its finance leadership has considered waiting until 2027, citing operational readiness and a pending lawsuit over the restructuring.

Why are AI labs so expensive to run?

Training and serving frontier models requires vast amounts of computing power, and the cost rises with each model generation. OpenAI alone expects to spend roughly $50 billion on compute in 2026 and has forecast cumulative cash burn near $665 billion through 2030, which is the core financial challenge a public listing would expose.