Two of the largest private companies in artificial intelligence entered the SEC's review queue within seven days of each other. Anthropic went first on June 1, 2026, and OpenAI confirmed its ownTwo of the largest private companies in artificial intelligence entered the SEC's review queue within seven days of each other. Anthropic went first on June 1, 2026, and OpenAI confirmed its own
Anthropic vs OpenAI IPO: What's Confirmed, What's Rumor, and Who Lists First
Two of the largest private companies in artificial intelligence entered the SEC's review queue within seven days of each other.
Anthropic went first on June 1, 2026, and OpenAI confirmed its own submission a week later.
What separates them now is not paperwork but timing: one has a target month, and the other has a target year.
Key Takeaways
- As of September 2026, Anthropic is the one closer to a listing, with a reported Nasdaq venue and a reported late-October window, while OpenAI's own chief executive has ruled out this year.
- Neither S-1 can be read yet, because both were confidential drafts — and by law the public version must appear at least 15 days before any roadshow, which makes that filing the only date worth watching.
- Anthropic's last confirmed valuation is $965 billion, set by its Series H in May 2026; OpenAI's roughly $852 billion figure is reported rather than company-confirmed.
- The revenue figures usually placed side by side are not the same kind of number, and comparing them like-for-like leaves a real but much narrower gap.
- SpaceX's June 2026 debut is the only completed case in this group, and it rose 19% on day one before swinging violently for months — which is what going first actually buys.
- Neither company's shares are available to ordinary retail buyers, and Anthropic has stated that transfers of its stock without board approval are void.
Will OpenAI or Anthropic IPO First?
Anthropic is closer, as of September 2026.
It confidentially submitted a draft registration statement on Form S-1 on June 1, 2026, a week ahead of OpenAI, and reporting since then has pointed to a Nasdaq listing as early as late October.
OpenAI has no month attached to it — only a year.
Three things put Anthropic in front, and none of them is about which company is more famous.
The first is visible progress, not paperwork. Anthropic has been reported working through the concrete pre-listing steps — arranging a large revolving credit facility, holding early investor meetings, and lining up a roadshow — while OpenAI's process has produced no comparable public activity since June.
The second is specificity. Anthropic's reported plan has a venue, a roadshow window, and a target month. OpenAI's has a year and a conditional.
The third is what each company has said out loud. OpenAI's chief financial officer told staff in August 2026 that the company will be public in 2027, or sooner if the business keeps accelerating, and framed the offering as another fundraise rather than a finish line. In September 2026, OpenAI's chief executive went further and called a listing this year ill-advised given everything happening around AI safety.
Anthropic has said nothing comparable.
It has simply kept moving through the process. That asymmetry — one company describing a milestone in the future tense, the other executing a sequence — is the clearest signal available to anyone outside either boardroom.
The order is not fixed, though, and the section on what could still change it explains why.
OpenAI IPO Plans 2026 vs Anthropic IPO Plans 2026: What's Actually Locked In
Very little of what circulates about either offering is confirmed by the companies or by a regulator.
Two facts are: both submitted confidential draft registration statements, on June 1 and June 8, 2026 respectively, and both said so publicly in a single short announcement.
Almost everything else — the banks, the venue, the dates, the price — is reporting.
The table below separates the two as of September 2026, because the distinction changes how much weight any of it should carry. Each cell is marked Confirmed when the company or a regulator has stated it, Reported when it comes from press coverage the companies have not endorsed, and Not disclosed when nobody credible has stated it at all.
Dimension | Anthropic | OpenAI |
Submission announced | June 1, 2026 — Confirmed | June 8, 2026 — Confirmed |
Type of submission | Confidential draft S-1 — Confirmed | Confidential draft S-1 — Confirmed |
Last valuation | $965 billion, Series H, May 2026 — Confirmed | Roughly $852 billion, March 2026 round — Reported |
Listing venue | Nasdaq — Reported | Not disclosed |
Target window | As early as late October 2026 — Reported | 2027, per company guidance to staff — Reported |
Ticker symbol | Not disclosed | Not disclosed |
Underwriters | Three major Wall Street banks — Reported | Overlapping set of the same banks — Reported |
Corporate form | Public benefit corporation with a long-term benefit trust — Confirmed | Public benefit corporation controlled by a nonprofit foundation — Confirmed |
Largest outside holders | Two large cloud providers, one capped at roughly 14% — Partly confirmed | One large software partner at roughly 27% — Reported |
Read down the Confirmed column and the offering looks thin.
That is not an oversight in the reporting. It is how the process is designed to work at this stage, and the next section explains the rule that produces it.
Why Can't You Read Either S-1 Yet?
Because neither document has been filed publicly.
Both companies used the confidential draft route, which lets a qualifying company hand the SEC a registration statement for private review before anything reaches the public record. Searching EDGAR for either company's S-1 today returns nothing from them — only filings by other companies that happen to name them as competitors.
The route exists under Section 6(e) of the Securities Act, added by the JOBS Act in 2012.
It comes with a deadline that is far more useful to an outside observer than most of the speculation around these two offerings. The SEC's own guidance states that the initial confidential submission and every amendment to it must be publicly filed no later than 15 days before the company conducts its road show.
That single rule turns a rumor into arithmetic.
A company cannot go on the road to sell an offering until its paperwork has been public for a little over two weeks. So the public S-1 arrives first, the roadshow follows at least 15 days later, and pricing and the first day of trading come after that.
Work backward from a late-October listing and the public filing has to land in the second half of September.
Work forward from silence and the date slips. Anyone tracking either company can stop waiting for a leak and simply watch EDGAR for the public filing, which is the first hard, checkable event in the whole sequence.
For OpenAI, no such filing has appeared.
How Do the Two IPO Timelines Compare?
Anthropic's timeline has more completed steps and fewer missing ones.
Its sequence runs from a confirmed funding round in May 2026 to a confirmed submission in June to a reported roadshow and listing window in October. OpenAI's runs from a completed corporate restructuring in October 2025 to a confirmed submission in June 2026 to a stated intention for the following year.
Anthropic's chain, with each step marked:
- May 28, 2026 — Series H round of $65 billion at a $965 billion post-money valuation. Confirmed by the company.
- June 1, 2026 — confidential draft S-1 submitted to the SEC. Confirmed by the company.
- Not yet — public S-1 filing on EDGAR. This is the step that dates everything after it.
OpenAI's chain:
- October 28, 2025 — restructuring completed, with the commercial business becoming a public benefit corporation under a controlling nonprofit foundation. Announced by the company.
- March 2026 — a very large private funding round, reported at roughly $122 billion raised. Reported.
- June 8, 2026 — confidential S-1 submission confirmed, with the company stating it had not determined timing for any further action. Confirmed by the company.
- 2027 — the year named by the company's finance chief, with an explicit condition attached. Reported.
One detail is worth keeping straight, because it gets flattened in most coverage.
June 8 is the date OpenAI confirmed its submission, not necessarily the date it submitted. Some reporting places the actual submission a couple of weeks earlier. The confirmed date is the one to use, and the earlier date should be treated as unverified.
Which One Is Actually the Bigger Business?
It depends entirely on which number gets used, and the two figures most often placed side by side are not measuring the same thing.
Anthropic's headline figure is an annualized run rate. The figure most often quoted for OpenAI is a full-year booked revenue total. Comparing one against the other is the single most common error in coverage of these two companies.
Here is the difference in plain terms.
An annualized run rate takes recent revenue — often a single month — and multiplies it out to a yearly figure. It describes the current pace of the business. Booked revenue for a completed year describes what the business actually recorded over twelve months, most of which were slower than the last one.
For a company growing at the speed these two are growing, those numbers can differ by a factor of three or more without either being wrong.
On a like-for-like basis, Anthropic is ahead. The company stated in May 2026 that its run-rate revenue had crossed $47 billion earlier that month, which is confirmed and first-party. Reporting through the summer put OpenAI's annualized run rate at roughly $40 billion by August 2026, which is not company-confirmed. The gap is real but narrower than the widely circulated pairing of Anthropic's run rate against OpenAI's reported 2025 booked revenue of about $13 billion suggests.
Scale is not the only thing that decides an offering, and OpenAI's advantages are genuine.
Stated the way its own backers would state them: it has the larger consumer footprint by a wide margin, the most recognized product name in the category, a broader developer and enterprise ecosystem, and — after the March round — enough capital that it can choose its moment rather than having the moment chosen for it. Its finance chief made that last point directly, describing the raise as the thing that creates flexibility on timing.
Anthropic's advantages sit on the other side of the ledger.
A higher current run rate, a heavier weighting toward enterprise and developer revenue, and reporting that suggests it may reach operating profitability sooner. Both companies remain unprofitable on a cumulative basis. Every profitability figure in circulation for either of them is reported or estimated, never confirmed.
What Could Still Change the Order?
Three things could delay Anthropic: a longer SEC review, an unreceptive market window, and the awkwardness of pursuing a record offering while its chief executive calls for the industry to slow down.
Two could pull OpenAI forward or push it back: faster growth, which its finance chief named as the trigger, and the unresolved governance question left by its restructuring.
Review timing is the first and most mundane. SEC comment rounds on a first-time registration statement can run longer than planned, and each round that extends past the public-filing target pushes the roadshow and the listing with it.
Market conditions are the second.
A large private-technology listing needs a receptive window, and the reception given to the year's earlier debuts in the same category was mixed. A company with a $965 billion valuation to defend has more reason than most to wait for a better week.
The third is the one specific to Anthropic, and it is genuinely awkward.
Weeks before its expected roadshow window, its chief executive published an essay arguing that the industry should slow the pace at which AI capability advances. Pursuing one of the largest technology offerings on record while calling for the sector to decelerate is a question the company will have to answer on the road — though the argument landed with less isolation than expected, since OpenAI's and Tesla's chief executives both publicly agreed with it within hours.
On OpenAI's side, the accelerant is the condition its own finance chief attached: sooner than 2027 if the business keeps inflecting.
The brake is governance.
OpenAI's restructuring left a nonprofit foundation in control of a for-profit entity, and that structure was cleared by regulators rather than left hanging: California's attorney general signed a memorandum of understanding setting conditions for non-objection in October 2025, and Delaware's issued a statement of no objection the following day. What it leaves behind is not a legal cloud but an unusual shape. A public-market investor in OpenAI would be buying into a company whose board is appointed by a nonprofit that is required to put safety and mission ahead of shareholder returns, and explaining that to institutional buyers is a harder pitch than explaining a large loss.
Where Do SpaceX and Databricks Fit in the Same IPO Queue?
They show up because people are not researching one company — they are researching a queue.
Search behavior around these offerings is dominated by multi-company queries that bundle Anthropic and OpenAI with other large private technology names, SpaceX and Databricks most often. Treating the question as a two-horse race misses what readers are actually asking.
The useful part of that bundle is SpaceX, because it already answers the question everyone is asking about Anthropic.
SpaceX completed its transition to the public market in June 2026, and its first day was a clear success: the stock closed 19% above its offer price and the company finished the day worth more than $2 trillion. The violence came later — the shares roughly doubled, then gave back more than half of that by early August, before recovering.
That is the closest available precedent, and it cuts both ways. Listing first sets the benchmark multiple that every later offering in the category gets measured against, which is an advantage. It also means absorbing the market's first, least-informed reaction to an entirely new asset class, which is not.
Databricks appears in the same searches without a confirmed public filing of its own.
Its presence is a signal about reader intent rather than about its own timeline. The practical takeaway for anyone tracking the group: the only dates that mean anything are public filing dates on EDGAR, and as of September 2026 exactly one of these four companies has actually completed a listing.
Can You Buy Anthropic or OpenAI Stock Before the IPO?
There is no ordinary retail route into either company's shares before it lists.
Both are private. Their stock sits with founders, employees, and institutional investors, and both companies restrict what holders can do with it. Any offer promising an ordinary investor direct access to pre-listing shares in either company deserves to be treated as suspect until proven otherwise.
Anthropic has been unusually direct about this.
The company states plainly that any sale or transfer of its stock not approved by its board is void and will not be recognized on its books, and that transfers of its shares to special purpose vehicles are void under its transfer restrictions.
Read that carefully, because it is stronger than a warning.
It means a buyer of an unapproved interest may end up holding a contract that the company will never recognize as ownership of anything. OpenAI has issued a broadly similar position on unauthorized transfers of its equity.
How to Spot a Fake Pre-IPO Offer
The pattern repeats across every high-profile offering, and it is recognizable.
- An offer of direct pre-listing shares to an individual investor with no accreditation check.
- Access packaged through a special purpose vehicle, which Anthropic has said is void under its own transfer restrictions.
- A named ticker symbol, when neither company has disclosed one.
- A specific listing date presented as fact, when no public filing has been made.
- Pressure to commit before an "allocation" closes.
The last one is the most reliable tell.
Genuine pre-listing transactions are slow, documented, and boring. Nothing about a real one requires a decision this afternoon.
Frequently Asked Questions
Will Anthropic IPO before OpenAI?
On the public record as of September 2026, Anthropic is on track to list first, having submitted a week earlier and with a reported target window this year against OpenAI's stated 2027.
When is the Anthropic IPO date?
No date has been confirmed; reporting points to as early as late October 2026, and the first checkable signal will be the public S-1 filing on EDGAR.
When is the OpenAI IPO?
OpenAI has not set a date, and its finance chief has guided to 2027 with the condition that it could come sooner if growth accelerates.
Is either company publicly traded yet?
No — both remain private, and a confidential draft submission is not a listing.
What will the ticker symbols be?
Neither company has disclosed a ticker, and any symbol circulating for either is guesswork.
Which company is worth more?
Anthropic's last confirmed valuation of $965 billion is higher than the roughly $852 billion reported for OpenAI, though the OpenAI figure is not company-confirmed and both predate either offering being priced.
Why is OpenAI waiting?
Its finance chief has pointed to the flexibility created by a very large private round, its chief executive has cited the AI safety environment, and an unresolved governance question around its restructuring remains under regulatory attention.
Can I buy shares in either company before it lists?
Not through ordinary retail channels, and Anthropic has stated that transfers of its stock without board approval are void.
Does listing first actually matter?
It sets the valuation benchmark the rest of the category is measured against, and it also means absorbing the market's first reaction — SpaceX rose 19% on its first day in June 2026 and then swung violently for months afterward, which is the closest example of both effects.
Conclusion
One of these companies has a month and the other has a year, and both of those are still reporting rather than fact.
The one date that will settle it is a public S-1 filing on EDGAR, which has to appear at least 15 days before any roadshow.
Watch for that filing, and treat everything before it as an estimate.
Market Opportunity
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This article is provided by Oliver Hughes for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial or investment advice. Cryptocurrency markets involve significant risk. Please conduct independent research or consult a qualified professional before making any investment decisions. The views expressed do not necessarily represent those of MEXC or its affiliates.
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