This is getting real. According to a Bloomberg report from July 15, the banks running Anthropic’s offering are scheduling the first meetings between the company and prospective investors over the coming weeks. That’s the step that usually lands right before the actual roadshow.
The possible listing date: October.
Who’s running it
Wall Street’s three biggest banks by revenue are leading the offering — Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase. Anthropic filed its IPO prospectus confidentially with the SEC back in June, and it’s been quiet since. These investor meetings are the signal that preparation has moved into its final stretch.
The numbers
- $965 billion valuation after the May funding round — the first time Anthropic passed OpenAI
- $227.5 billion raised globally through IPOs in 2026 (excluding SPACs), already the strongest listing year since 2021
- OpenAI pushed its own debut to 2027, with advisers worried that tech-stock volatility would soften demand
Which means Anthropic goes first. Also ahead of DeepSeek, which is preparing its own listing after growing annualized revenue to somewhere between $400 and $500 million.
Why now
The driver is both boring and enormous: compute costs money. Training frontier models and then serving millions of users every day burns capital at a scale private rounds eventually can’t cover. Anthropic enters the public markets from strength, though — carried mostly by enterprise demand and the coding tools around Claude Code.
My take
I wrote about the first October rumors here back in March, and about the confidential S-1 filing in June. What’s different now: banks don’t invite investors in for a chat. This is the point where an IPO stops being a plan and starts being a date.
The date interests me less than what follows it. A public Anthropic has to report quarterly. A company that built its identity on safety, restraint and the Long-Term Benefit Trust picks up a second, very loud stakeholder. How those two fit together is the real question — not whether the stock pops on day one.
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