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Anthropic has now become a household name on Wall Street, ahead of what is poised to be a historic public debut this November. Anthropic could be the largest IPO of all time, surpassing the current record holder, SpaceX. But just six years ago, the company behind the chatbot, Claud, was a niche under the radar research lab spun out of its biggest rival, OpenAI. Here's how Anthropic went from AI underdog to tech powerhouse.
It all began in late 2020 in San Francisco, two years before the launch of ChatGPT, OpenAI's then Vice President of Research Dario Amodei, and his sister Daniela, left the company with a group of senior leaders over concerns about AI safety and OpenAI's goal of commercializing this new technology. When you feel that you can't trust someone, when you feel that their values are not what they say they are, when you feel that they're not honest, that makes it very hard to continue to work with the company, to continue to trust the company. The Amodei's, along with five other former OpenAI employees, co-founded Anthropic in 2021 as a public benefit corporation with the mission to ensure the world safely makes the transition through transformative AI.
The first investment at the time came from Skype founder, Jaan Tallinn. Before anthropic even out of product. It was $124 million fundraise and then FTX's now convicted former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried led the series B back in April 2022, which valued Anthropic at $2 billion, and soon after, Big Tech started seeing value in Anthropic, with Alphabet and Amazon both investing over $1 billion in Anthropic over the next year. By 2022, AI was becoming mainstream. As the chatbot race was in full swing. OpenAI was the first to market with ChatGPT in November of that year.
A new artificial intelligence program called ChatGPT made its debut online. This project from the OpenAI Research Lab can write essays and carry on convincing written conversation. And ChatGPT took off, breaking records with an eye popping 100 million users in just two months. Others, including Google, raced to catch up to OpenAI's consumer facing bots, and Anthropic, meanwhile, focused more on coding and enterprises, a move that would differentiate it from OpenAI and turn out to be a much more profitable and reliable stream of revenue. Anthropic's Claude Code and Claude Cowork became so capable, it started to become the boogeyman for software stocks. The thought that AI could just disrupt
entire industries turned into the 'SaaSpocalypse' earlier this year. Anthropic was now the AI lab to beat. That guy Claude is very busy. Destroying a lot of companies. Yeah. That all powered explosive growth, enterprise customers flocked to Anthropic's coding tools, overtaking OpenAI's share of U.S. business spending on AI. It propelled Anthropic from a $380 billion valuation in February of 2026 to just shy of $1 trillion in May, surpassing rival OpenAI for the first time.
Their once quiet rivalry erupted into headlines this year as well. Anthropic took aim at OpenAI in a Super Bowl ad targeting the decision to put ads into ChatGPT. Leading OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to fire back and say that Anthropic was an expensive product for rich people. It all culminated in the infamous moment at the AI India Summit, where Altman and Amodei refused to clasp hands on stage. And that was not the only controversy. In February, Anthropic found itself head to head with the Pentagon. The DoD wanted Anthropic to grant the military unfettered access to its models across all lawful purposes. While Anthropic wanted assurance
that its technology wouldn't be used for fully autonomous weapons or domestic mass surveillance, they were unable to come to an agreement, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth designated Anthropic as a supply chain risk, costing Anthropic its Pentagon contracts and sparking months of legal back and forth in federal courts. Anthropic will also be the first major AI lab to go public. Its S-1 filing showed the company pulled in more than $33 billion in revenue in the first nine months of the year, 1,200% higher than the same period a year ago. But there is an unusual amount of risk
here, more than 90 pages of them in Anthropic's own IPO prospectus. Chief among these risks is safety. Whoever wins AI wins. I think that's very important. But I think the technology has very real risks. And, you know, the mechanism how we address those risks is still under discussion. But we all need to work. We all need to work together to make sure that we can win and we can win safely. Anthropic has positioned itself as more safety conscious than competitors.
Still, the company warns investors that in the future, AI may exhibit unexpected strategic or self-preserving behaviors and that if not developed and deployed with appropriate safeguards, AI models could pose catastrophic or existential risks to humanity. Anthropic also pointed to their substantial debt, warning that it needs to continue to grow its customer base and rapidly scale revenue to generate the cash flow necessary to satisfy these commitments. It also has almost $900 billion in spending commitments related to compute and infrastructure, and that breakneck growth did slow quarter over quarter. Anthropic's IPO could set records, but it will also test investors appetite for an entirely new asset class.
Show me the large language model large company that's come to market for an IPO. I guess we're going to learn a bunch over some period of time in the future. Assuming that Anthropic and OpenAI go public, we'll learn a bunch about exactly how public market investors will look at that and value that. However markets respond, it will set the tone for other AI companies looking to go public, especially rival OpenAI, which confidentially filed its own IPO paperwork with the SEC in June and has signaled it's looking for a 2027 debut.
