The artificial intelligence developer Anthropic took a tentative first step Monday toward becoming a publicly traded company, a move that would give it access to a huge pool of investors' money while opening its books.

Anthropic said Monday in an announcement that it had confidentially submitted a draft Form S-1 to the US Securities and Exchange Commission, which allows the company to go public after the SEC's review. Anthropic said it has not yet set the number of shares to be offered or what prices, and that the move will "depend on market conditions and other factors." 

An Anthropic representative didn't immediately respond to questions about the expected timing or valuation of the offering.

The Claude-maker is one of three big tech firms expected to have initial public offerings this year amid what some call an "AI gold rush." SpaceX, the Elon Musk-owned rocket company that also includes the Starlink ISP, the AI lab xAI, and the social network now known as X, filed for an IPO in May. Anthropic's major rival, ChatGPT maker OpenAI, is expected to follow suit soon.

The frenzied IPO race reflects the market's eagerness to cash in on its trillion-dollar bets, as AI companies rush to secure the massive funding needed to survive. The AI industry is capital-intensive, driven by the immense costs of maintaining the computing power required to train large language models, as well as the data centers, silicon and energy grids to keep them running. 

Though Anthropic turned over voluntary documents for regulatory review, that doesn't guarantee a final decision on the IPO, and the company could still decide to not go public, according to Patrick Corrigan, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame. Based on typical SEC timelines, a public filing could be expected in a few weeks, with stock trading potentially starting in two to four months, Corrigan told CNET in an interview. 

A revenue spotlight? 

The AI industry has been a highly speculative landscape, where valuation is determined by a company's future potential rather than current profits. An online tracker of revenue and losses found that more than twice as much money has been spent on AI development as has been made back, pointing to billions of dollars in debt. The only major company to come out ahead is Nvidia, which makes the chips at the center of the AI gold rush. 

Critics point out that AI companies have raised capital through manipulated accounting, using "annualized" revenue spikes and ignoring core costs to hide poor margins, thereby misleading investors. 

"Their valuations are, at this point, so high that it's becoming increasingly impractical to raise more capital, and their investors are likely demanding some kind of liquidity event," said Ed Zitron, author of the Where's Your Ed At newsletter and host of the Better Offline podcast. 

Anthropic said last week it raised $65 billion in a funding round that valued the company at $965 billion. The company has focused heavily on business customers and developers, with huge growth in 2026 spurred by its Claude Code programming tool, potentially putting it ahead of OpenAI in total value. 

But there are limits to what a company can raise on the private market, and those investors will want to make their money back with sizable returns. Going public and having stock bought not just by individual traders on Robinhood but also by institutional investors like insurance companies and pension funds could raise significantly more capital. These companies would also be able to use that stock to secure loans they might not be able to get now. 

"The scale of it's eye-popping," said Rob Lalka, a business professor at Tulane University. "The fact that this company raised as much as they had raised, and they ran through quite a bit of money pretty quickly as they got here."

Will there be a crashout? 

The confidential submission means we don't yet have access to the documents required for a public stock sale, including a prospectus that details the business's operations and the risks and challenges it faces.

That eventual public filing will have to include details on the company's financials and the numerous potential risks it faces. Transparency will also be key. "If they lie to investors, then the company could be held liable," Corrigan said.

Just as companies like Google, Apple, Meta and Microsoft have quarterly earnings calls, where CEOs take questions from investment analysts about the direction of their businesses, Anthropic and its peers would also have to regularly report financial information. The CEOs of Anthropic and OpenAI -- Dario Amodei and Sam Altman, respectively -- would be subject to the same questioning.

More importantly, public trading of stock in the biggest AI-specific firms would put those companies' valuations in the hands of investors, including the general public, who could buy and sell based on perceptions of the companies' moves or the AI industry as a whole. 

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If, as some observers suggest, the industry is overhyped, such swings could deflate a bubble -- or inflate it even further.

Zitron believes it could lead to a crashout akin to WeWork, as "people realize how bad the underlying economics are." WeWork, which operates coworking spaces, filed for an IPO in 2019, with documents that raised serious concerns among investors about its corporate governance and ability to turn a profit. The company pulled its filing little more than a month later.

It's hard to know what will happen one or two years down the road, but the future of these companies tends to be quite binary, leading to either a collapse or a major consolidation. Zitron believes that if OpenAI or Anthropic survives, they could be absorbed or swallowed up by a hyperscaler like Google, Microsoft or AWS -- or eventually delist from the Nasdaq to function as a tiny, niche service provider. 

Wall Street could also decide to overlook any poor profit-and-loss numbers. Lalka pointed to Meta, which spent billions of dollars on the "metaverse" and changed its name from Facebook to signal a switch to a technology it has since basically given up on. AI companies could get the same shrug from investors. 

"Maybe it won't lead to the type of hard accountability that some are saying would happen here," Lalka said.

Other companies, like Uber, were unprofitable for years. Lalka said that if that remains the case with AI companies, investors might demand they focus more on projects that generate revenue than on "side quests," as OpenAI termed activities like its Sora video generation app.

Another possibility is that investors chase not the company's actual value but what they think others will pay for the shares. That possibility, which Corrigan referred to as a "beauty contest," might give the companies a fleeting glimpse of high valuations.

 "There's real risk for investors that prices could get carried by momentum and then come back down to Earth," he said.