:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc()/GettyImages-2170647410-a36d7e339e944ca58b82b70bdaf57a47.jpg "We Might Finally Get Some Big AI IPOs—Which Would Mean a Look at Their Financials")
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Key Takeaways
- Anthropic’s IPO could set the benchmark for other AI companies that follow it.
- The startup’s public debut would test investor appetite for AI amid concerns about bloated valuations. And its filing would offer a look under the financial hood of a well-known chatbot company.
Here come the big AI IPOs. (Maybe.)
Anthropic, maker of the Claude chatbot, is preparing for an initial public offering that could come next year, according to the Financial Times. The company is also said to be in talks to raise funding that would push its valuation over $300 billion. The report followed others saying OpenAI, the company behind rival ChatGPT, is also getting ready for an IPO that could drive its valuation to $1 trillion. Spokespeople for both Anthropic and OpenAI denied having set plans for an IPO in those reports.
The first of these companies to reach public markets will set the bar for the rest—and open up the AI-investment landscape beyond the biggest publicly traded tech companies like Nvidia (NVDA), Oracle (ORCL), Microsoft (MSFT), and Meta Platforms (META), whose stock valuations have lately stoked concerns of bubble-ish excesses.
It would also give the masses a good look at the economics of AI language-model developers. Elon Musk’s xAI, the company behind the Grok chatbot, in late November was said to be preparing to close a $15 billion fundraising round in December, pushing its pre-money valuation to $230 billion.
WHY THIS MATTERS TO YOU
The most well-known AI frontier startups—companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, Databricks, Perplexity and xAI—are private. One going public could prompt others to follow, which would open up the AI investment landscape beyond the chipmakers and Big Tech companies that investors have poured dollars into.
IPO documents, particularly those called S-1 filings, are rich sources of information, because companies are legally bound to give public-market investors a thorough look at the business before they raise funds from them.
The big reveal is in the financials—what revenue growth looks like, profit margins, and how much cash companies are burning to develop new products, the latter of which has been a source of AI investor angst. They’ll also show companies’ cap tables, detailing their ownership structure. Filings from Anthropic or OpenAI would adress a lot of investor questions about the state of frontier AI development.
Meanwhile, private markets are flush with AI startups. The sector has drawn roughly 65% of venture capital investments in 2025 through the third quarter, according a PitchBook’s report published this week. Though that figure is skewed by the multibillion-dollar fundraising rounds of a few big startups, it also shows how ubiquitous such startups have become.
“No other emerging technology has accounted for a larger share of total deal activity,” PitchBook director of research Kyle Stanford and his team wrote in the report. The old high-water mark was in early 2013, when mobile accounted for roughly 20% of deal counts; AI accounts for 35% currently.
That could make for an exciting pipeline of coming IPOs if one AI startup unlocks the floodgates to public markets. But it could also fuel Dotcom bubble comparisons.
