Anthropic is holding preliminary discussions with potential investors as it prepares for what could be a landmark initial public offering, according to people familiar with the matter. The meetings remain at a high level and have not yet delved into specific financial figures or valuation discussions.
Company Chief Financial Officer Krishna Rao is personally leading the sessions.
Anthropic confidentially filed its draft registration statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in June, officially kicking off the process for its highly anticipated public market debut. The company has not yet announced a specific timeline for the IPO, but it has begun exploratory outreach to some investors in recent weeks.
According to the sources, the meetings have focused on the company's overall strategic direction, including the development of the Claude series of AI models, the popular coding assistant Claude Code, the company's positioning in the enterprise market, its management team, and the cadence of product releases.
Founded in 2021 by a group of researchers and executives who left OpenAI, the company has become its primary rival. In late May, Anthropic completed a funding round that valued it at $965 billion, surpassing OpenAI's $852 billion valuation from late March.
Anthropic is best known for its cutting-edge Claude models and has made significant strides in selling AI technology to large enterprises, one of the most fiercely contested battlegrounds among AI developers. The company said in May that its annualized run-rate revenue had surpassed $47 billion, far exceeding the roughly $10 billion in revenue expected for the full year 2025.
Driven by this strong growth trajectory, some Anthropic investors believe the company could seek a valuation of $2 trillion or more when it goes public. The sources emphasized that this figure is purely an investor analysis and does not come from Anthropic itself.
Meanwhile, OpenAI is also preparing for what could be an equally massive IPO. The company confidentially filed its own draft registration statement with regulators shortly after Anthropic, but as of late June, it had not yet begun similar pre-IPO investor meetings or provided a clear timeline for its listing.