Anthropic has hired Wilson Sonsini, the Silicon Valley law firm that has long been associated with listings by tech companies, as it prepares for a public offering that could come as soon as 2026, the Financial Times reported. The move represents an official transition from hypergrowth to public-market readiness for the Claude-maker, which is also considering a new funding round that would value it at north of $300 billion.
Wilson Sonsini to steer S-1 prep, governance and scrutiny
For a late-stage tech company that is set to make the jump into the S-1, hiring Wilson Sonsini could be called step one in the textbook. Beyond drafting disclosures, the advisor usually leads governance overhauls, Sarbanes-Oxley readiness and risk-factor hygiene with an AI flavor. For a company like Anthropic, it also means detailing model safety processes, data provenance, content moderation liabilities and reliance on cloud partners and scarce AI chips.
Wilson Sonsini has ushered hundreds of Silicon Valley IPOs and advised on Google’s offering, giving Anthropic an experienced hand just as it is building the compliance and controls that public investors expect. Inside, IPO checklists range from building out the audit committee and recruiting independent directors to cleaning up its equity plan and financial restatements stretching years under PCAOB standards. That work frequently does take 12–18 months, a timeframe that aligns with the “as early as 2026” timing referenced by the FT.
Valuation ambitions and the capital intensity of frontier AI
Anthropic is also considering a new private round that would value the company north of $300 billion, the FT said, following a previously reported raise of $13 billion that valued it at $183 billion. The step-up would make Anthropic one of the highest-valued private AI businesses, behind only OpenAI’s reported $500 billion valuation in association with its own IPO investigation, as per an earlier report by Reuters.
To see why, the logic is simple: Training and deploying frontier models is massively capital-intensive. Research-firm analyses like those from Epoch AI indicate the training costs of state-of-the-art models are heading toward billions per model, and at scale, inference power is compressing gross margins without significant unit-economics optimizations. That’s driving companies to lock in long-dated compute and power, negotiate advantageous cloud credits and raise large chunks of money before going public in order to cut down execution risk.
All such plans are essential integrations of Anthropic’s strategic relationships with hyperscalers. Amazon has pledged as much as full support in the billions of dollars, plus deep integration with AWS Bedrock, while Google has also invested and offers its own cloud infrastructure. These relationships grow distribution, but concentrate and expose price risk that will have investors wanting these risks quantified in disclosures on risk factors and revenue detail.
What Anthropic’s eventual IPO could look like for investors
Banks have been sounded out but no underwriter has been selected, the people said. For a listing of this magnitude, envisage a top-drawer syndicate headed by the likes of Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and J.P. Morgan, and with long-only institutions allied to tranches allocation, it will divide opinion succinctly among ducks on the median pond. Dual-class stock is a frequent characteristic of founder-led AI companies, but Anthropic’s governance is unique in that it provides for its Long-Term Benefit Trust, intended to weigh safety and societal issues. Any IPO would have to describe how that structure intersects with shareholder rights and board control.
Key things to look for as the eventual S-1 comes out:
- annualized revenue run rate and growth
- gross margin both including and excluding cloud credits
- unit economics of enterprise contracts
- training and inference cost curves (and how they impact margins)
- model release cadence
- concentration among customers
Public investors will also want to see a plan to diversify compute supply — be it through further cloud deals, on-prem partners or alternative silicon strategies — to spread the risk of slowdowns/hiccups in GPUs and power.
Rising tide for AI listings as investor appetite persists
Anthropic’s announcement comes as appetite for AI infrastructure and applications among investors shows no signs of waning. Strong market performances for chipmakers and cloud providers with links to generative AI have helped to improve sentiment, while a few tech IPOs in the past year have reopened the window for high-growth listings. If both Anthropic and OpenAI go public, they’d set new limits to the upside for software IPOs and focus more of the public markets’ gaze on AI safety, governance and compute economics.
Still, the hurdles are nontrivial. Additionally, regulatory activity around AI safety and content standards is ramping up in the U.S. and Europe, while the SEC has intensified focus on non-GAAP adjustments and forward-looking AI claims. For issuers, clean disclosures and conservative guidance will be just as important as headline growth.
What to watch next as Anthropic readies for the public markets
Short-term, we’ll watch for:
- final bank selection
- additional independent directors with AI and compliance backgrounds
- signs of pre-IPO financing that secures compute supply
If Anthropic can demonstrate expanding gross margins, disciplined model release cycles and enduring enterprise adoption, it should be well positioned to test the public markets on its own schedule.
