Anthropic's IPO Machine Is Warming Up

Anthropic is starting to talk to the people who might actually buy its stock. Bankers working on the AI company's potential initial public offering have begun scheduling meetings between Anthropic executives and prospective investors, according to a person with knowledge of the plans who spoke to CNBC. That's an early but telling step in the long runway toward a public listing, and it suggests Anthropic's IPO planning has moved past the paperwork stage.

The company, best known for its Claude models and the widely used Claude Code coding assistant, confidentially filed its IPO prospectus with the Securities and Exchange Commission back in June. Confidential filings let companies test the waters with regulators before committing to a public timeline, and Anthropic still hasn't said when it plans to actually go public. But according to Bloomberg, which first reported the investor meetings, the company could hit the public markets as soon as October, though that timing isn't locked in and could shift.

These investor meetings function as a temperature check. Before a company commits to the full roadshow, the formal, high-pressure tour where executives pitch big institutional investors on buying shares, bankers first gauge informal demand and interest. Getting Anthropic executives in front of prospective investors now is a sign that the machinery behind a mega-IPO is turning.

The bank lineup underscores just how big this listing is expected to be. Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase, the three largest Wall Street banks by revenue, are all involved in the planning. An Anthropic spokesperson declined to comment on the reporting.

A race against OpenAI, and against the clock

If Anthropic does list this year, it would likely beat its biggest rival, OpenAI, to the public markets. OpenAI also confidentially filed for an IPO with the SEC in June but hasn't disclosed further details. For Anthropic, getting there first could matter beyond bragging rights. Going public while enthusiasm for AI stocks is still running hot gives a company more room to set favorable terms and price its shares well. If that enthusiasm cools later, latecomers could face a tougher market.

Anthropic's rise has been rapid by any standard. The company was founded in 2021 by a group of executives and researchers who left OpenAI over disagreements about its direction. Since then, it has built a strong enterprise business, driven in large part by demand for Claude Code among corporate customers. That momentum showed up clearly in its valuation: Anthropic closed a $65 billion funding round in May at a $965 billion valuation, which pushed it above OpenAI's $852 billion valuation for the first time.

An IPO of that scale would land in an already active year for public offerings. Anthropic's potential debut would follow June's blockbuster SpaceX IPO, and it would mark another instance of a company at the center of the AI boom opening itself up to public investors after years of staying private while raising enormous sums from venture capital and private backers. For years, the biggest names in AI, Anthropic and OpenAI chief among them, avoided public markets altogether, preferring to raise money in private rounds at valuations most public shareholders never got a chance to buy into.

Why Wall Street wants this

The banks circling Anthropic have their own reasons to want this deal to happen, and to happen well. The AI spending boom has already been good business for Wall Street, fueling a broader resurgence in profits as firms look for ways to help investors fund the AI buildout, or hedge their exposure to it. A listing of Anthropic's size, with Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan all involved, would be one of the highest-profile AI-related offerings yet, and a chance for public market investors to buy direct exposure to a company at the center of the boom rather than betting on it indirectly through chipmakers or cloud providers.

Nothing is finalized. The October timeline reported by Bloomberg could move, and Anthropic hasn't confirmed any date publicly. But the fact that its bankers are already setting up investor meetings shows the company is treating this as a live process, not a distant possibility. Whether Anthropic actually rings the opening bell before the year is out may hinge less on internal readiness and more on whether investor appetite for AI stocks holds up long enough to get the deal done on favorable terms.