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For years the most valuable companies in artificial intelligence stayed private, raising tens of billions from venture investors rather than face the scrutiny of public shareholders. That is now changing. As of mid-2026, the firms that have defined the AI boom are edging toward the stock market, and a quiet contest has formed over which of them lists first. The order matters more than it might seem, because the first pure-play frontier AI company to price its shares will set the template investors use to value everyone that follows.
The backdrop is a public market that has roared back to life after a long drought. For several years few large companies chose to go public, leaving a backlog of mature private firms with nowhere obvious to cash out. In 2026 that changed abruptly. The second quarter alone produced a record $104.9 billion across 48 offerings, according to Renaissance Capital, led by SpaceX’s $75 billion listing, the largest in history. SpaceX did more than break records. By absorbing an offering of unprecedented size without stumbling, it proved that public investors were ready for the biggest deals private technology had to offer, and it gave every other giant a reason to believe the demand was there. With the window open and valuations high, the calculation for staying private has shifted, and the firms burning the most cash to build frontier models are exactly the ones with the most to gain from tapping public capital.
Anthropic, the maker of the Claude models, has taken the most concrete step so far. The company confidentially filed a draft registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission on June 1, 2026, giving it the option to go public once regulators finish their review. A confidential filing is deliberately quiet, letting the SEC vet the financials before any details reach competitors, and it commits the company to nothing, but it is a real move toward the markets rather than a rumor. The filing caps a year of staggering fundraising. In February, Anthropic raised $30 billion in a Series G round led by GIC and Coatue that valued it at $380 billion, up from $183 billion at its prior round. Three months later, in May, it raised another $65 billion in a Series H that pushed the valuation to roughly $965 billion, within sight of the trillion-dollar mark while still privately held. Underpinning those numbers is extraordinary revenue growth, with the company’s annualized run rate climbing from about $9 billion at the end of 2025 to more than $44 billion by May, crossing $47 billion that month.
The growth comes at a cost. According to Fortune’s reporting on Anthropic’s internal projections, the company expected a loss of roughly $14 billion in 2026 and did not anticipate turning free-cash-flow positive until around 2028, a reminder that building frontier models remains an enormously expensive undertaking even for a company growing this fast. Its training costs are reported to peak near $30 billion, said to be several times less than what its main rival spends. As for the listing itself, the widely reported consensus among underwriters, media, and prediction markets points to a Nasdaq debut as early as October 2026, with Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Morgan Stanley leading an offering expected to raise more than $60 billion. Bankers’ base case, as reported, is a debut above $1 trillion, which would make Anthropic the first AI company to go public at that scale, and secondary-market trades have already implied a valuation in the $1.05 to $1.15 trillion range. None of this is confirmed by Anthropic, which has set no date, price, or share count, so the specifics should be read as expectation rather than fact.
Anthropic is not racing alone. OpenAI, its closest competitor and the company behind ChatGPT, followed with a confidential filing of its own on June 8, setting up the prospect of the two most valuable private AI companies in the world coming public in overlapping windows. The stakes in the timing are real. Whichever lists first gets to define how the market values a frontier AI business, including how investors weigh enormous revenue growth against equally enormous losses, and that framing tends to anchor the companies that follow. For now Anthropic holds the lead in the formal process, having filed first, but OpenAI’s scale means its own debut will draw at least as much attention.
The AI contenders are arriving into a market already crowded with large technology listings, which both proves the demand and competes for it.
| Company | Latest valuation | Revenue / run rate | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Anthropic | ~$965B (private) | ~$47B run rate | Confidential S-1 filed June 1; Oct 2026 target (reported) |
| OpenAI | ~$850B+ (private) | Multibillion run rate | Confidential S-1 filed June 8 (reported) |
| SpaceX | ~$1.7T at listing | n/a | Public; debuted June 2026 |
| Bending Spoons | ~$19B (IPO target) | $601M in Q1 | Pricing a Nasdaq IPO |
SpaceX is the proof of concept, already trading after its record debut. Bending Spoons, the Italian owner of AOL, Vimeo, and Eventbrite, is pricing a deal of up to $1.62 billion, showing the window is open to profitable mid-sized businesses as well as giants. And Cerebras, an AI chipmaker, raised $5.6 billion earlier in the cycle in what ranked as the largest AI IPO ever, one of nine separate offerings to clear a billion dollars in the quarter. Together they describe a market with both the appetite and the depth to absorb the AI heavyweights when they come.
The prize for going first is influence over how an entire category is priced. A pure-play frontier AI company has no real precedent on the public markets, and the investor who has to decide what a business growing past a $40 billion run rate while losing billions is worth will lean heavily on whichever company sets the first reference point. That is why the sequencing, not just the listing, is being watched so closely. The risk runs in the other direction. Valuations set in a moment of enthusiasm can prove hard to defend once shares trade freely, and a company that comes public at more than a trillion dollars while still years from profitability leaves itself little margin for disappointment. The same volatility that briefly rattled markets earlier in the year could return and narrow the window before any of these companies step through it.
For now, the race is real but unfinished. Anthropic has filed and is reportedly aiming for the fall, OpenAI has filed its own paperwork close behind, and prediction markets center Anthropic’s actual listing on the end of 2026. Whether one or both follow through, and in what order, will shape not only their own futures but how the public markets learn to value the most consequential and most expensive companies of the AI era.
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