Anthropic's First-Mover Advantage in AI Expected to Expand IPO Lead Over OpenAI

Artificial Intelligence Firms Engage in High-Stakes Battle for Computing Power

The confidential IPO filing by Anthropic PBC on Monday has put the company ahead of OpenAI in the battle for a fundraising edge that will determine which firm will win the ultimate battle for computing power. The two artificial intelligence startups are racing to tap into the US market's unparalleled depth and liquidity, which will grant them access to the necessary chips, data centers, and talent to build their AI models.

The risk for both firms is that the first to go public will gain an immediate advantage in securing access to the resources needed to build their AI models. With Elon Musk looking to turbocharge SpaceX's nascent AI offerings by strapping them to a hyperscaler with a chipmaker joint venture and doing an IPO, OpenAI and Anthropic can't risk falling behind. Being first to market comes with a potential downside, as the first mover may be able to set the tone, while the second mover could look like an also-ran and be forced to compare itself with the other firm in marketing discussions.

According to Matthew Kennedy, senior IPO market strategist at Renaissance Capital, the bankers are telling OpenAI and Anthropic that the time is right to go public, citing the double-digit gains this year for the S&P 500 Index and the Nasdaq 100 Index. However, Kennedy cautioned that the advantage of listing first may diminish once both firms are public.

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Anthropic's move to file confidentially for an initial public offering adds to the sense that its momentum is increasing. The maker of the Claude chatbot leaped to a $965 billion valuation in its latest private funding round, above OpenAI's for the first time, as its revenue surged. The company also signed a surprise pact with SpaceX for AI compute that could total nearly $45 billion by May 2029, if neither party cancels it first.

Anthropic's latest funding round values it more than $100 billion above OpenAI, chiefly reflecting its edge in frontier models, while recent pacts with SpaceX, Amazon.com's AWS, and CoreWeave have helped narrow the compute gap. Bloomberg Intelligence analysts Mandeep Singh and Robert Biggar wrote in May that Anthropic's hypergrowth in annual recurring revenue to around $47 billion, about five times compared with December, points to Anthropic's model lead over large-language-model rivals in areas such as coding agents.

By going public, Anthropic and OpenAI would gain access to a much wider range of buyers, including millions of individual private pension investors. A listing also provides capital and lets companies use their stock for acquisitions and to reward employees with shares they can more easily sell.

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Some are warning that the enthusiasm for AI themes can't continue, and that time is of the essence for the two IPO candidates. The Philadelphia Stock Exchange Semiconductor Index is up 83% this year.

The two companies face similar questions about their enormous capital expenditures and what their profit margins are going to be, said Jay Ritter, director of the IPO Initiative at the University of Florida. "SpaceX is a unique business but OpenAI and Anthropic are much more similar and it would be surprising if one was to trade at a significantly higher price-to-sales ratio than the other," Ritter said.

Even with Anthropic taking the lead, OpenAI isn't far behind. The ChatGPT firm is preparing to file for an IPO in the coming weeks and is working with Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Morgan Stanley to submit a confidential IPO filing ahead of a potential listing in the fall, Bloomberg News has reported.

OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman has played down the timing of its first-time share sale, saying that going public is a financing event and that the company is focused on delivering the best technology and building the best business. With both companies' private valuations nearing the $1 trillion mark, investors will likely be applying similar scrutiny to Anthropic and OpenAI's public IPO filings when they come. Should the first to make it out of the gate prove to be a flop, coming second could be an opportunity to recalibrate the pitch to what public investors are really looking for.

"For OpenAI, the conventional read is that Anthropic just seized the narrative advantage by filing first," PitchBook Senior Late-Stage Company Research Analyst Harrison Rolfes wrote in emailed comments. "The unconventional read is that OpenAI got the better end of this: Anthropic just volunteered to absorb all the disclosure risk first, and OpenAI now has a free option to watch how institutional investors react to audited frontier AI financials before committing to its own price."