Anthropic has selected Nasdaq for its potential forthcoming initial public offering as its frontier rival OpenAI pushes its own expected listing into at least 2027 amid mounting concerns over AI safety.
The Claude developer has chosen Nasdaq as the exchange for its potential IPO, Business Insider reported Sunday, citing a person familiar with the company's plans.
Anthropic confidentially submitted IPO paperwork to the Securities and Exchange Commission in June and is reportedly targeting a listing before the U.S. midterm elections in November.
The company is seeking to raise as much as $100 billion at a valuation of around $2 trillion, Reuters reported Friday, in what could become the largest IPO in history. Nvidia is in talks to invest as much as $10 billion as an anchor investor in the offering, according to the report.
Anthropic raised $65 billion in May at a $965 billion post-money valuation. Its annualized revenue run rate had risen above $65 billion by the end of July, compared with about $9 billion at the end of 2025, Reuters reported.
The company appears to be moving ahead with its IPO even as CEO Dario Amodei calls for frontier AI companies to slow the pace at which they improve their models.
Amodei wrote Saturday that AI labs should "pace the frontier" to give safety work more time to keep up with rapidly advancing capabilities. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman later said his company would agree to Amodei's proposed first step, to embed third-party evaluators within the company to keep an eye on their safety practices and produce independent reports.
OpenAI, however, is delaying its IPO plans
Altman said in an interview with Fortune published Saturday that OpenAI would not go public in 2026. He cited the safety and alignment work the company still needs to complete, amid a firestorm of controversy over recent AI agent hacking incidents.
"I actually think that, given everything happening with safety, right now would be an ill-advised moment to go public, and we don't feel pressure on that," Altman said.
Asked specifically whether a 2026 listing was off the table, Altman said, "I would say not 2026," adding that OpenAI still has work to do on determining how AI companies and governments should cooperate.
Altman's comments mark a notable shift in the apparent plans of one of the world's most anticipated public offerings. OpenAI had been weighing an IPO that could rank among the most valuable of all time, similar in scale to Anthropic's listing, while the firm's CFO Sarah Friar had reportedly told employees that the company expects to be public in 2027.
Bankers for both OpenAI and Anthropic have also been pushing credit rating agencies to give the companies investment-grade ratings following their respective IPOs, the Financial Times reported earlier this month, as The Latent covered. Investment-grade ratings may give the companies cheaper access to corporate debt markets as the total expenditure towards developing frontier AI systems and related hardware infrastructure continues to rise.
Anthropic's decision to press ahead leaves it positioned to become the first of the two leading private AI labs to test public-market demand for listings at multi-trillion-dollar valuations.