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Anthropic prepares end-of-August S-1, targets IPO bigger than SpaceX's $86B

Bloomberg reports the Claude maker is running the numbers to match or top the record raise, with an October debut and super-voting shares in play.

By Ben Krauss · Daily desk lead ·

Anthropic PBC is preparing to publicly file its S-1 by the end of August and expects to match or exceed the $86.2 billion SpaceX raised last year in the largest first-time share sale on record, Bloomberg reported August 20. An October market debut is the working target. SpaceX priced its offering at $75 billion and grew it to $86.2 billion with the overallotment; Anthropic is running the numbers to top that bar.

The revenue arc explains the ambition. Annualized run rate reached $65 billion by the end of July, up from $47 billion in May and roughly $9 billion at the end of 2025. Preliminary Q2 revenue came in above $11.5 billion against $787 million a year earlier. Roughly 80% of that revenue comes from business customers buying Claude, per TechCrunch, which reframes the story from consumer-AI hype into something closer to an enterprise-software listing.

The losses are the other half of the picture. Anthropic reported a net loss of nearly $42 billion for 2025, even as Q2 delivered positive adjusted operating income. May’s private round closed at $65 billion on a $965 billion post-money valuation, comfortably above OpenAI’s March $852 billion mark.

CFO Krishna Rao has been briefing investors while skirting the valuation question, per Bloomberg’s sources. Citigroup is being added to a syndicate that already includes Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan, and a revolving credit facility above $10 billion is being finalized.

Governance is where the offering gets structurally interesting. Anthropic filed its confidential S-1 on June 1, and reporting from The Information, Bloomberg, and Reuters indicates public buyers won’t get board control. Dario Amodei, who holds about 2%, and six co-founders receive super-voting shares. The three-member Long-Term Benefit Trust, which includes former Fed chair Ben Bernanke, governs on mission grounds; Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar stepped down as trustee on August 4 to become Chief Global Affairs Officer.

Google’s 2004 dual-class listing normalized founder control at IPO. Anthropic is asking public markets to underwrite something further: a safety-mission trust sitting above the voting founders, backed by the largest revenue ramp anyone has taken to a first-time filing.

Sources