Anthropic has moved closer to a major US stock market debut after filing paperwork with the US Securities and Exchange Commission for a planned initial public offering later this year. The maker of the Claude chatbot is now seen as being ahead of rival OpenAI in the race to go public, as investor interest in artificial intelligence continues to surge and reshape the technology sector.
The filing marks another milestone in Anthropic’s rapid rise from a research-focused lab to one of the most closely watched companies in AI, with a valuation that has been reported at nearly $1 trillion. Industry observers expect OpenAI to follow with its own public-market move soon, reflecting the intense competition among leading AI firms to secure funding, expand infrastructure and strengthen their market positions.
The wider technology sector is also showing signs of a major capital-raising push tied to AI investment. Alphabet, the parent company of Google, said it intends to raise $80 billion in equity to support spending on AI infrastructure, making it its first stock offering in more than two decades and one of the largest equity raises ever planned. Elon Musk’s SpaceX has also recently announced plans to list on the Nasdaq, adding to the sense that major private technology companies are preparing for a new phase of growth and financing.
Analysts warned that the pace of listings and fund-raising could fuel worries about a bubble in AI-related assets. Susannah Streeter, chief investment strategist at Wealth Club, said the surge in planned flotations is likely to increase excitement around AI while also raising concerns that parts of the market may be moving into bubble territory. She noted that the strong investor appetite for these deals reflects how quickly AI enthusiasm has pushed valuations higher across the US technology industry.
Streeter also drew comparisons with the dot.com boom and bust, saying there are “clear echoes” of that era when optimism about the internet drove technology stocks to extreme highs before confidence collapsed as financing conditions tightened. She cautioned that much of the value creation in today’s AI companies has already taken place in private markets, which could leave retail investors exposed if they buy in after the sharpest gains have already been made.
Even so, she argued that AI companies are generally more substantial than many of the speculative internet firms that dominated the dot.com period. According to Streeter, companies such as Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI are building long-term ecosystems around AI, data infrastructure and computing power that could influence the global economy for decades.
Nicholas Hyett, lead alternatives analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown, said the fund-raising plans by Anthropic and Alphabet reflect a major shift among the biggest names in US technology. He said these companies have moved away from the capital-light business models that once defined Silicon Valley and are now committing vast sums to the infrastructure needed to compete in artificial intelligence.
