Anthropic, the artificial intelligence company behind the Claude chatbot, has begun meeting with prospective investors ahead of a planned stock market listing that bankers say could rank among the largest technology offerings on record.
People briefed on the plans say Anthropic's underwriters have told investors the initial public offering could seek to raise more than $100 billion, a sum that would value the company at close to $2 trillion. That would be more than double the $965 billion valuation Anthropic commanded after a funding round in May 2026, and would place the company's market debut above even SpaceX's record-setting listing earlier this year.
A valuation leap
SpaceX's own listing had set the bar for this year's technology IPO market. Elon Musk's rocket and satellite company saw its stock close its first day of trading up 19.2% at $160.95, and shares later climbed to a peak near $225 before sliding to lows around $104 as early investor lockups expired and concerns mounted over the scale of capital spending in the space and satellite-internet business. A listing that values Anthropic near $2 trillion would eclipse that benchmark and underscore how far AI valuations have run since the start of the boom.
Filing and roadshow timeline
Anthropic is reported to have filed confidential paperwork with the US Securities and Exchange Commission around June 1, 2026, beginning the regulatory process that typically precedes a public listing by several months. According to people familiar with the planning, investor meetings tied to the roadshow could begin around the week of November 9, with the company aiming to complete its debut before the Thanksgiving holiday on November 26. Executives have cautioned that the timetable remains fluid and could slip into later in 2026 depending on market conditions.
The scale of the planned offering reflects continuing investor appetite for the leading developers of large language models, even as spending on AI infrastructure draws growing scrutiny. Anthropic, founded in 2021, has built Claude into one of the most widely used AI assistants for both consumers and enterprise customers, competing directly with OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini.
But appetite for large new technology listings has been mixed this year. Excluding SpaceX and the memory-chip maker SK Hynix, more than 100 companies that went public in 2026 are sitting on a weighted-average loss of about 4%, a sign that investors have grown more selective about which debuts to support. Oura, the wearable health-tracking company, recently became the third company in a matter of weeks to postpone its own stock market debut, underscoring the uneven conditions facing issuers even in sectors investors consider promising.
Some investors have also grown wary of the sheer volume of capital being committed to AI infrastructure — the data centers, chips and power contracts underpinning the current boom — questioning whether revenue growth at companies such as Anthropic and its rivals can keep pace with the spending.
Banks involved in the planning are said to be weighing how to pitch a company whose business has grown rapidly but whose long-term profitability, like that of other frontier AI labs, still depends heavily on continued heavy spending on computing capacity. Anthropic has steadily expanded its enterprise customer base and the range of Claude-branded products it sells to businesses, developers and government agencies, a track record executives are expected to lean on during the roadshow to justify the scale of the valuation being discussed.
The timing of the listing also matters for how it is received. A debut squeezed in before Thanksgiving would put Anthropic's shares in front of investors during a holiday-shortened trading period, while a slip into December or beyond would place it closer to year-end, when portfolio managers are typically less willing to add large new positions. Either way, bankers are treating the window as an opportunity to capitalize on continued enthusiasm for frontier AI companies before sentiment shifts further.
Anthropic has not publicly confirmed the size or timing of the offering, and the roadshow schedule could still move. If the company proceeds roughly as described to investors, its listing would test whether public markets are willing to underwrite a valuation that would make Anthropic one of the most valuable companies ever to go public, at a moment when enthusiasm for the broader AI trade is being weighed more carefully than it was a year ago.
