Anthropic is getting ready to go public. The company behind Claude, the AI assistant used across industries from insurance to retail, has started arranging pre-IPO investor meetings. Bankers from Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and JPMorgan are setting up sessions between Anthropic executives and large institutional investors. October is the current target, though nothing is confirmed.
This is a meaningful step. Pre-roadshow meetings are how companies test demand and refine their pitch before committing to a date. Anthropic filed its IPO paperwork confidentially with US regulators in June, which started the clock. The fact that banks are now scheduling meetings suggests the process is moving, not stalling.
The numbers behind the story are worth understanding. Anthropic's revenue grew from roughly $9 billion annualized at the end of 2025 to an estimated $47 billion by May 2026. In the first quarter of this year alone, the company brought in $4.8 billion. It projected $10.9 billion for the second quarter, which would be its first profitable quarter. Salesforce, for comparison, took about 20 years to reach $30 billion in annual revenue. Anthropic got there in roughly three years.
The engine behind that growth is Claude Code, an AI tool that helps software developers write and manage code. It reached $8 billion in annualized revenue by May 2026, and Anthropic now holds more than half of the market for AI coding tools. Around 300,000 businesses use Claude in some form, and the number of customers spending over $1 million per year has more than doubled in just two months.
If Anthropic lists in October, it would beat rival OpenAI to public markets. OpenAI also filed confidentially for an IPO in June, but has since shifted its expected timeline to 2027. Being first has real strategic value: public market enthusiasm for AI is high right now, and that could fade. The SpaceX IPO in June raised $75 billion and saw shares jump 19% on day one. But SpaceX shares have since pulled back significantly from their post-IPO high, which shows that a big opening does not protect against later investor skepticism.
There are genuine questions about Anthropic's business that a public listing will force into the open. The company's two biggest investors, Amazon and Google, are also its biggest compute suppliers and direct competitors in the AI market. Amazon has committed up to $25 billion in Anthropic, but Anthropic in turn routes enormous amounts of spending back to Amazon's cloud. Public shareholders would inherit a company whose cost structure and revenue distribution are deeply tied to investors who also compete with it.
For business operators using Claude or evaluating it, an IPO does not change the product or pricing in the near term. What it does do is make Anthropic a public company, subject to quarterly reporting and investor scrutiny. That creates more transparency about its finances and more accountability around the commitments it makes to enterprise customers. It also means the company will face pressure to grow revenue consistently, which generally favors keeping enterprise customers happy rather than disrupting them.
The formal prospectus, when it becomes public, will be the document to read. It will contain audited financials, a breakdown of how revenue is actually counted, and a list of risks the company itself acknowledges. Those details will matter more than any valuation headline.