Anthropic picks Nasdaq for potential IPO, targets October listing: Report

New business data points to the fact that US tech startup Anthropic has selected Nasdaq for its potential initial public offering (IPO), Business Insider noted on Sunday, citing a person familiar with the firm’s plans.

The firm, which has been targeting an October stock-exchange debut, has given Nasdaq another major win, according to a person familiar with the matter stated to Business Insider. Nasdaq secured the SpaceX stock-exchange debut earlier this year.

SpaceX was valued at $1.75 trillion, while some estimates have put Anthropic’s valuation at $2 trillion, although that figure has not yet been finalised.

The record-setting size of these IPOs, combined with the shortage of tech listings in recent years, has made winning this competitive pressure particularly valuable. Both Nasdaq and its rival hope to be noted as the preferred venue for future AI IPOs.

Anthropic was founded in 2021 by former OpenAI executives who were frustrated that the potential of AI, along with concerns around its safety, was not being understood or taken seriously enough.

The firm’s name, somewhat paradoxically, means “relating to human beings”. It is led by CEO and co-founder Dario Amodei, a San Francisco native who holds a PhD in biophysics from Princeton University, rather than computer engineering like many of his Big Tech peers.

His sister, Daniela Amodei, is additionally a co-founder and serves as the firm’s president. Anthropic has 5,000 employees, according to PitchBook.

Until this year, Anthropic was firmly behind OpenAI, which shot to prominence with the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, transforming the technology industry and triggering an AI arms race.

While OpenAI expanded into areas ranging from video creation to web browsers, Anthropic took a narrower approach, focusing on developing an AI platform for computer programmers.

That strategy has paid off, as coding is one of the few AI capabilities for which users are willing to pay significantly. Claude Code, Anthropic’s assistant for developers, has become one of its most popular products and helped propel its projected annual topline to $65 billion.

In the meantime, only a small share of ChatGPT users pay for a subscription, while OpenAI has put video AI and other side projects on the back burner.

Like OpenAI, Anthropic requires enormous amounts of computing power and infrastructure to develop so-called frontier models and stay ahead of rivals, amid concerns that China could catch up.

Both firms have boosted money on an unprecedented scale. Anthropic was valued at just under $1 trillion when it boosted $65 billion in May.

With venture capital firms and even sovereign wealth funds no longer able to invest at that scale, larger sums can increasingly be boosted only through public markets.

That makes an IPO a major and risky step that could determine whether a viable business model exists for Anthropic’s vision of the AI revolution.

OpenAI, which had initially indicated that it could additionally pursue an IPO this year, is now signalling that it will wait until 2027.

According to US media notes, the firm lost almost $42 billion in 2025 and is anticipated to continue burning cash for years.

To attract market participants, Anthropic will promise, according to the Wall Street Journal, that its topline opportunities exceed $30 trillion.