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AI company Anthropic files to list shares, heating up race with OpenAI

Anthropic, the company behind the powerful artificial intelligence chatbot Claude, has filed to get ready to list its shares.

The development comes days after it raised $65 billion, valuing it at $965 billion.

The company, founded in 2021 by a breakaway faction from OpenAI, was viewed as an upstart that tailored its chatbots to the needs of businesses and developers, rather than consumers.

Late last year, the release of its agentic coding assistant propelled it ahead in the AI race, as the company’s annualized revenue skyrocketed from $9 billion at the end of 2025 to more than $47 billion in May.

“This gives us the option to go public after the SEC completes its review. The proposed initial public offering will depend on market conditions and other factors,” the company said in a statement, announcing the confidential filing on its website.

The number of shares to be offered and the price have not yet been set, the company said. Last week, Anthropic released its latest model, Claude Opus 4.8, to the public.

The upstart began gaining ground against its larger rival OpenAI late last year with the release of its Claude Opus 4.5, which became a huge hit among developers and enthusiasts who were able to merely describe an app, website, online dashboard or research problem in English, and have the coding agent complete the task.

As adoption of Claude grew, OpenAI has been juggling numerous big bets, including the shuttered text-to-video model Sora, agentic shopping and an AI-native browser, with mounting challenges to monetize its base of 800 million users. The company has since streamlined its operations, focusing on its coding product, Codex, and continues to invest in image generation and robotics.

The announcement puts Anthropic ahead of OpenAI, which reportedly hired bankers Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley in the race to go public. Anthropic now eclipses its rival, which was valued at $852 billion in March.

Elon Musk’s xAI, which operates the chatbot Grok, is a part of SpaceX that is gearing up to go public next week. It will be the largest initial public offering of stock in history, and a successful listing will make Musk the first trillionaire.

The blockbuster year for Silicon Valley IPOs will test people’s appetite to invest in the promise of artificial intelligence, amid worries and warnings of an AI bubble.

Nasdaq introduced a rule change this year, shortening the three-month waiting period for stocks to be included in the index to 15 days.

It was done to accommodate monster listings such as SpaceX. The cooling-off period allows newly listed stocks to stabilize before passive index funds pick them up, but indices said it’s a much-needed update, as companies stay private longer, are more mature and have much larger valuations than in the past.

Dario Amodei, co-founder of Anthropic, has been outspoken about the risks of artificial intelligence wiping out half of all entry-level jobs and driving unemployment upby 20%. Some in the Trump administration have criticized his views as alarmist and accused his advocacy of AI safety of being an attempt at regulatory capture to create onerous compliance barriers that would restrict AI development to a handful of large companies, locking out smaller competitors.

In March, the company sued the Pentagon after it was designated as a “supply chain risk” for refusing to allow the use of its AI model for domestic mass surveillance or fully autonomous weapons.

The White House softened its posture against Anthropic in May, after the release of its AI model Claude Mythos, which proved itself adept at finding critical software bugs. The incident prompted a U-turn in the Trump administration’s laissez-faire approach to AI regulation and led to the consideration of safety testing before broader public release.

Anthropic’s Mythos model has now become a tool of geopolitical advantage for the U.S., as governments across the globe, including the European Union, have requested access to the powerful tool to identify and patch vulnerabilities in the banking and financial system that could be exposed to hacking.

The explosive demand has increased Anthropic’s need for AI chips, causing previous outages and forcing the company to set usage limits for users. To secure access to vital hardware, the company signed agreements with Amazon, Google, Broadcom and SpaceX in April for new computing capacity.

Alphabet plans to raise $80B for AI goals, Berkshire to invest $10B

Alphabet is looking to raise $80 billion in equity offerings, including an investment from Berkshire Hathaway, the Google parent said on Monday, in its aggressive push to fund a costly expansion of its AI infrastructure.

The deal brings in Warren Buffett’s diversified holding company as a major new investor, adding a high-profile endorsement of Alphabet’s long-term AI and cloud strategy.

Alphabet raised its annual capital spending forecast by $5 billion to between $180 billion and $190 billion in April, ramping up investments to capture growing AI-driven computing demand with its business AI tools and custom chips.

The Google parent will sell $10 billion worth of shares to Berkshire in a private placement, comprising $5 billion in Class A common stock at $351.81 per share and $5 billion in Class C capital stock for $348.20 per share, both below Monday’s closing prices.

The company’s shares were down 2% after the bell.

“All companies are thrilled when Berkshire takes positions, because it is the kind of shareholder that companies like to have,” said Steven Check, president and chief investment officer of Check Capital Management, which has investments in Berkshire stock.

Berkshire’s investment adds to the position it has built since the third quarter last year. Last month, Berkshire said it more than tripled its stake in the Google parent, which at $16.6 billion has become one of its largest common stock investments.

“This additional purchase underscores that Greg Abel(Berkshire CEO) believes that Alphabet will earn a reasonable return on its AI capex spending even with the firm issuing additional shares,” said Bill Stone, chief investment officer at Glenview Trust Company.

Alphabet said it aims to raise $30 billion through concurrent public offerings backed by investment banks, split evenly between depositary shares tied to mandatory convertible preferred stock and Class A and C shares.

In addition, the company expects to launch a $40 billion at-the-market offering program in the third quarter, giving it flexibility to sell Class A and Class C stock gradually over time.

“The company is experiencing strong demand for its AI solutions and services from enterprises and consumers, at levels that are exceeding the company’s available supply,” Alphabet said.

Alphabet has raised more than $85 billion in debt across six currencies and markets over the last year, bringing its total debt balance to over $100 billion, the company said.

The Los Angeles Times and Reuters contributed to this report.

Copyright 2026 Tribune Content Agency. All Rights Reserved.

This story was originally published June 1, 2026 at 1:35 PM.

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