Anthropic Is Racing OpenAI to Wall Street. Its Own Revenue Number May Not Survive the Trip.

Anthropic spent the first half of 2026 doing two things at once: raising money at a valuation that would have sounded absurd twelve months ago, and quietly building the paperwork to become a public company. This week, those two tracks converged. According to reporting from CNBC and Bloomberg on July 15, bankers are now scheduling investor meetings ahead of a possible initial public offering — with a listing as soon as October 2026 on the table, pending market conditions and regulatory sign-off.

That timeline would put Anthropic on Wall Street before its chief rival. OpenAI has pushed its own IPO plans from a targeted fall 2026 window out to 2027, according to multiple reports this month. For a company that spent 2023 and 2024 as the perpetual number two to OpenAI, arriving on the public markets first would be a genuine reversal of the pecking order investors have taken for granted.

How Anthropic Got Here

The IPO groundwork was laid on June 1, when Anthropic confidentially submitted a draft S-1 registration statement to the SEC — its own announcement confirmed the filing, which is standard practice for large, high-profile companies and lets the SEC's review process begin without releasing a public prospectus. The confidential filing landed less than a week after Anthropic closed a $65 billion Series H round in May, pushing its valuation to $965 billion. Amazon and Google both participated with corporate-led tranches on top of the round, alongside investors including Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, and Sequoia Capital.

That $965 billion figure now sits above OpenAI's own $852 billion valuation — the first time Anthropic has out-valued its rival. Underwriting the potential offering are Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and JPMorgan Chase, according to reporting on the deal.

The number doing the heavy lifting behind all of this is revenue. Anthropic's annualized run rate went from $9 billion at the end of 2025 to $47 billion by May 2026 — climbing through $14 billion in February, $19 billion in March, and $30 billion in April on the way there. The company has said it expects to turn profitable in the second quarter of 2026 if it hits a quarterly revenue target of $10.9 billion, which would produce a forecast operating profit of roughly $559 million.

It's a growth curve that looks almost engineered for an IPO roadshow slide. Which is exactly why the fine print underneath it matters.

The Asterisk Nobody's Supposed to Notice

Back in the spring, when Anthropic's run rate first hit $30 billion and appeared to leapfrog OpenAI's roughly $25 billion figure, OpenAI pushed back — not on the number itself, but on what it means. According to reporting on an internal dispute between the two companies, OpenAI told staff and analysts that Anthropic's real, apples-to-apples figure was closer to $22 billion once revenue shared with cloud partners was stripped out.

The disagreement comes down to a basic accounting choice. Anthropic sells a meaningful share of Claude access through cloud marketplaces — AWS and Google Cloud among them — and books the entire customer payment as its own revenue, treating the cloud providers' cut as an expense paid out afterward. OpenAI does the reverse with its Microsoft-channel sales: it nets out Microsoft's share before the money ever counts as revenue. Put simply, if a customer spends $1 on tokens through a cloud partner, OpenAI records only its own slice — often around 20 cents — while Anthropic records the full dollar.

Both approaches are permitted under U.S. GAAP today; there's no rule being broken here. Anthropic's position, when it has addressed the dispute, is that it is the "principal" in these transactions and that its cloud partners are functioning as a distribution channel rather than a co-seller. But the two methods describe very different economic realities, and they're being used by two companies that investors are actively trying to compare head to head. Bank of America estimated in March that Anthropic could end up paying out as much as $6.4 billion to hyperscale cloud partners in 2026 through these revenue-sharing arrangements, up from $1.9 billion in 2025 — money that shows up in the topline revenue figure before it goes right back out the door.

Why the IPO Changes the Math

None of this has been a serious problem for Anthropic so far, because private companies get to set their own reporting conventions and the market has mostly taken headline run-rate numbers at face value. That gets harder the moment a company files a public, audited prospectus. SEC disclosure rules require far more granular breakdowns of revenue recognition than anything either company has published to date, and analysts covering the space don't expect regulators to quietly bless two direct competitors using opposite treatments for what is, functionally, the same kind of transaction. If both Anthropic and OpenAI end up filing S-1s in the same stretch of 2026 and 2027, the accounting question that's mostly lived in analyst notes and the occasional leaked memo so far is going to end up sitting in a public filing, with a signature on it.

That's worth keeping in mind the next time a headline cites an AI lab's annualized revenue as settled fact. The number is real in the sense that money changed hands. Whether it means what it appears to mean — whether $47 billion measures the same thing $47 billion measured a year ago, or the same thing a rival's $33 billion measures today — is still, in a very literal sense, up for negotiation. Anthropic wants Wall Street to trust a growth story built on that number by October. Wall Street's first real job will be figuring out what the number is actually made of.

Sources

Anthropic announcement of its confidential draft S-1 submission: https://www.anthropic.com/news/confidential-draft-s1-sec

Investor's Business Daily summary of Bloomberg-reported Anthropic IPO timing and valuation: https://www.investors.com/news/technology/anthropic-ipo-open-ai-stocks/

Forbes analysis of OpenAI and Anthropic revenue-recognition differences: https://www.forbes.com/sites/josipamajic/2026/03/25/openai-and-anthropic-count-revenue-differently-and-investors-are-looking-into-it/

Semafor reporting on the OpenAI-Anthropic revenue comparison dispute: https://www.semafor.com/article/04/10/2026/anthropic-is-gaining-on-openais-revenue-but-hasnt-yet-eclipsed-it

Proactive Investors coverage of Bank of America analysis on Anthropic cloud-partner revenue sharing: https://www.proactiveinvestors.co.uk/companies/news/1088432/anthropic-growth-set-to-boost-amazon-s-aws-revenue-acceleration-says-bank-of-america-1088432.html

TechCrunch coverage of Anthropic's confidential IPO filing: https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/01/anthropic-files-to-go-public/