On June 1, Anthropic filed its confidential S-1 with the SEC, which paves the way for a potential IPO later this year.
The company is one of the three massive IPOs slated for 2026, and it’s the second out of the gate behind SpaceX, which confidentially filed its own S-1 back in April and is on track to go public in mid-June.
OpenAI, the third of the big three, has yet to file its own draft registration statement and is almost certain to be the last to come public.
And while I’m generally lukewarm on the prospects for initial shareholders, given the target valuations for each of these companies, Anthropic’s move to file now is something of a tactical masterstroke.
Not only has the company laid the groundwork to come public ahead of peer OpenAI – it has also offloaded much of the public perception risk onto SpaceX.
We’ll get into that further below, but first let’s take a closer look at the potential timeline for Anthropic’s IPO.
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What Comes After the Confidential S-1 Filing?
The confidential filing comes after a lot of preparation by the company and allows it to receive SEC comments without the public scrutiny of a public filing.
Filingtrack.com has a useful breakdown of the process and puts the time from confidential filing to IPO at 4-6 months.
Importantly, though (and as we’ve seen with the SpaceX IPO), without pushback from the SEC, there’s no reason the company can’t accelerate its timeline.
SpaceX, for example, submitted its own confidential draft registration on April 1, with a public S-1 coming on May 20 and a target IPO date of June 12.
A similar timeline would see Anthropic coming public as early as mid-August.
It’s worth noting, however, that Anthropic has engaged the law firm Wilson Sonsini, which helped Alphabet (GOOG) go public back in 2004, when the company was still called Google.
In the case of Google, the public S-1 was filed on April 29, 2004, and the company didn’t IPO until August 19, 2004, nearly four months later.
Of course, the IPO process has changed markedly since then (a confidential S-1 filing wasn’t even an option until 2012, when it was limited to “Emerging Growth Companies,” and it wasn’t expanded to all potential public offerings until 2017), and even though the public can’t see financials, the SEC can offer any pushback they have now that the confidential filing has been made.
Given that, a more realistic timeline for Anthropic’s IPO may be October or November, assuming they’re not putting the pedal to the metal the way that SpaceX has.
But more important than the mechanics of the IPO process may be public perception, which is where SpaceX really comes into play, and why I referred to Anthropic’s move as a tactical masterstroke earlier.
Why the Success of Anthropic’s IPO (Probably) Depends on SpaceX
I do not believe that Anthropic’s filing coming when it did was in any way a coincidence.
Filing the confidential S-1 after SpaceX had set an IPO target date will allow Anthropic to gauge public perception of SpaceX’s IPO while under the cover of the SEC’s review period and without opening its books to the investing public.
These IPOs are historic in scale, and filing first puts SpaceX at a much higher risk of falling flat if the investor appetite for a massive, speculative IPO just isn’t there. It also puts SpaceX in pole position to enjoy the most successful IPO if the investor appetite is there.
If SpaceX crashes and burns, Anthropic can delay its public filing (or pull it entirely), or simply scale back its ambitions and aim for a lower valuation that may be better supported by the market.
At the same time, the filing will allow Anthropic to rush to market ahead of OpenAI if SpaceX’s IPO is well received.
Anthropic seems to be taking a more conservative approach that, in my mind, doesn’t really cap their upside too badly in exchange for letting SpaceX test the waters.
In fact, the only real loser here would seem to be OpenAI, which is increasingly at risk of finishing third in a two-horse race. That is, unless there’s boundless investor interest for un- (or barely) profitable LLM companies.
If you’re considering buying Anthropic in the IPO, keep an eye on how SpaceX performs. Anthropic certainly seems to be.
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