What to Expect from Two of the Biggest IPOs of 2026: OpenAI and Anthropic

There are three absolutely massive IPOs on the horizon.

One is SpaceX, as OPTO recently detailed.

The other two are among the most visible companies in the world right now, namely Anthropic and OpenAI.

Until a couple of years ago, neither was well-known outside tech circles. Today, they are household names, virtually synonymous with the field of generative artificial intelligence (AI).

Both remain that curious phenomenon, a startup worth hundreds of billions of dollars. However, speculation is increasing that they are well advanced on their trajectory to listing.  

Let’s quickly look at their respective stories, get into the nitty gritty of their roads to IPO and discuss what it all means for investors. 

OpenAI: from Upstart to Incumbent

OpenAI was founded in December 2015 as a non-profit AI research lab by figures including Sam Altman and Elon Musk. 

According to its charter, its founding mission was “to ensure that artificial general intelligence – by which we mean highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work – benefits all of humanity.”

In 2019, OpenAI shifted to a “capped-profit” structure to attract capital and scale development.

A major inflection point came with ChatGPT’s release in November 2022, which drove widespread adoption of generative AI.

Amid the tech milestones, there has been more than a touch of personal drama.

In November 2023, CEO Sam Altman was briefly ousted and then reinstated, revealing strains at the governance level.

Then there’s the ongoing beef with Elon Musk, which centres on Musk’s claim that OpenAI abandoned its founding non-profit mission, instead prioritising profit and its partnership with Microsoft [MSFT].

Since 2024, this has escalated into a series of lawsuits and countersuits, with Musk alleging fraud and breach of contract, while OpenAI accuses him of harassment and anti-competitive behaviour as he builds rival firm xAI.

In recent months, the firm has been modulating its approach.

On March 24, OpenAI announced it was scrapping its Sora video model and walking away from a proposed $1bn deal with Disney [DIS] just four months after announcing the partnership. The company said it will shut the app – launched in September 2025 – to redirect compute towards higher-priority areas such as robotics.

The Disney tie-up was initially seen as a landmark deal, but never progressed and no investment was made as OpenAI shifted strategy. The decision follows an internal “code red”, with Altman refocusing efforts on core priorities: competing with Anthropic for enterprise demand and defending ChatGPT’s position against Alphabet’s [GOOGL] Google and other rivals.

The firm has also been moving to diversify its base of partners and clients. In particular, it has struggled to come out from the shadow of Microsoft, which owns a 27% diluted stake in the for-profit part of the organisation.

In a document seen by CNBC that closely resembled an IPO prospectus, on March 24 OpenAI wrote that, “If Microsoft modifies or terminates its commercial partnership with us, or if we are unable to successfully diversify our business partners, our business, prospects, operating results and financial condition could be adversely affected”. 

Anthropic: Conscientious Challenger

Anthropic was founded in 2021 by former OpenAI researchers, with a focus on building safer, more interpretable AI systems. Early positioning centred on “constitutional AI”, a method designed to align models with human values.

The company quickly attracted significant backing from Google and Amazon [AMZN], securing multi-billion-dollar investments and deep cloud partnerships that enabled rapid scaling.

Anthropic’s Claude models emerged as a leading alternative to ChatGPT, gaining traction with enterprise users for their safety features and long-context capabilities.

By 2024-25, Anthropic had positioned itself as OpenAI’s primary rival in the generative AI race, balancing rapid model iteration with a strong emphasis on governance and alignment, while expanding commercial adoption across enterprise and developer ecosystems.

The differences between the two were brought into sharp contrast in a recent episode involving the US Department of Defence. 

Back in February, US President Donald Trump said he would direct every federal agency to stop using Anthropic’s AI tools: “We don’t need it, we don’t want it, and will not do business with them again!” he wrote in a Truth Social post. Elsewhere, US Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth said that he had labelled the firm a “supply chain risk”.

This followed a refusal on the part of Anthropic to give the US military complete access to its tools, over concerns they would be used in “mass surveillance” and “fully autonomous weapons”.

However, OpenAI wasted no time in stepping into the gap and signing a deal with the Pentagon. This provoked widespread backlash, which in turn prompted the firm to quickly announce it had made changes to the deal, which Altman himself branded “opportunistic and sloppy”.

Road to IPO

“Am I excited to be a public company CEO? 0%. Am I excited for OpenAI to be a public company? In some ways, I am, and in some ways I think it’d be really annoying,” Altman said on the Big Technology podcast in December. 

Since then, speculation has been mounting. 

At the end of January, the Wall Street Journal reported that sources said the listing could come in Q4 2026, and that the firm was holding informal talks with Wall Street banks and expanding its finance team, including Ajmere Dale as chief accounting officer and Cynthia Gaylor as corporate business finance officer responsible for investor relations. 

A public listing would help bolster investor confidence after questions arose over how the company plans to fund its AI infrastructure and chip deals, expected to total hundreds of billions of dollars in the coming years. The IPO would also mark a major step in the company’s transition from fast-growing startup to publicly accountable AI platform.

However, the WSJ commented that executing a successful IPO by year-end would be challenging, as OpenAI continues to navigate the complexities of rapid growth, recent leadership changes and mounting pressure in its consumer-facing markets. 

Anthropic, meanwhile, is somewhat behind its rival in terms of IPO prepping, but is making solid progress.

On 12 February, it closed a Series G funding round of $30bn, more than doubling the $13bn raised in its September Series F round, and bringing its post-money valuation to $380bn.

The valuation equates to 27 times the company’s annual revenue run rate of $14bn. Growth has been striking, with annual recurring revenue increasing tenfold each year over the past three years.

Looking ahead, Anthropic has raised its 2026 revenue target to $18bn, set a 2027 goal of $55bn and projected $148bn by 2029. As Morningstar noted, the investment thesis for Anthropic “rests not on current profitability but on the speed at which the margin structure is improving”.

OpenAI does not disclose how much revenue it retains from enterprise customers. As such, again in the words of Morningstar, “investors are being asked to price a business whose most important metric has been withheld. That is not a reason to dismiss the position – it is a reason to wait for the S-1 before sizing it.”  

In truth, investors should approach both IPOs with cautious optimism. 

OpenAI offers a high-profile entry into the generative AI market, but key financial metrics remain opaque, making valuation uncertain until its S-1 filing. Anthropic shows rapid growth and ambitious revenue targets, yet its profitability is still developing. Both listings could deliver substantial upside if growth trajectories continue, but investors will need to weigh high valuations against execution risks, market competition and the substantial capital required for AI infrastructure.

What Does All This Mean for the Broader Market?

PitchBook reckons that, if the three potential mega IPOs go ahead, they could “conceivably create more value than all VC-backed IPOs since 2000 have collectively.”

Meanwhile, Fortune observed that an OpenAI or an Anthropic IPO “would mean a cascade of much-needed returns for US venture capital, a sector starved for liquidity for half a decade.”

Several prominent tech startups are reportedly weighing listing, among them Strava, Cerebras, Kraken, Motive and Discord. If one or all of the big three mooted for this year are a success, that could trigger a wave of subsequent, smaller IPOs. 

By a similar token, if one or all of the big three publicly decide to push back their IPO, having advanced this far along the path towards it, that would also send a message – one which investors would need no help interpreting.