Top analyst sees ‘opening of the floodgates for the IPO market’ after Anthropic’s filing as dotcom bubble comparisons fly

Artificial intelligence company Anthropic is moving toward going public on Wall Street, the latest chapter in its meteoric rise from a little-known research laboratory to one of the leading AI companies valued at $965 billion. Anthropic said Monday it has submitted a confidential filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for a proposed initial public offering of its common stock. “This gives us the option to go public after the SEC completes its review,” Anthropic said in a brief statement. “The proposed initial public offering will depend on market conditions and other factors.” The company said it hasn’t decided on the number or price of shares to be offered. Anthropic said last week it had raised $65 billion in private funding that will push its valuation to $965 billion, a whopping number that makes the five-year-old maker of the Claude chatbot one of the world’s most valuable startups. Anthropic now has vaulted ahead of its chief rival, ChatGPT maker OpenAI, not only in market value and reported revenue but also on the path to becoming a publicly traded company. “I think we were all expecting OpenAI to go first, so it was a little bit surprising,” said Patrick Corrigan, a law professor at Notre Dame University who studies IPOs. “Public investors are going to be comparing them roughly around the same time, and so there seems to be a bit of a first movers’ advantage here.” Anthropic said it’s now making annualized revenue of $47 billion from selling its technology to people and organizations using Claude to write code and do other work and personal tasks on their behalf. Anthropic was formed in 2021 by ex-OpenAI leaders and now both AI firms, along with Elon Musk’s rocket and AI company SpaceX, are all expected to become publicly traded. All three have been losing more money than they make, fueling concerns of an AI bubble. Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives said Anthropic’s move marks a major step for the company to get ahead of OpenAI and &