Anthropic files for IPO at $965 billion valuation as global capital bets everything on AI

Anthropic, the maker of Claude, has confidentially filed for an IPO at a $965 billion valuation, and almost immediately announced its next big move. The story of a company not yet five years old has become a symbol of the era: global capital is betting ever more heavily on AI, despite growing public unease.

A record IPO for AI

Anthropic, founded in 2021 by Dario and Daniela Amodei after they left OpenAI, has reached a valuation that most public companies fail to reach in decades. $965 billion is comparable to the market capitalization of JPMorgan Chase or Visa and far exceeds the combined value of most European banks. Before going public, the company raised investment from Amazon (more than $8 billion), Google (several billion) and a number of sovereign funds, including partners from the Persian Gulf states.

A confidential filing is standard practice for large tech IPOs: it lets a company agree terms before public disclosure and adjust the valuation if needed. Anthropic, however, did not wait around and almost immediately announced its next significant move.

Notably, at the current valuation Anthropic is worth three times as much as OpenAI, despite lower revenue. This surge in expectations, detached from current results, has become the defining feature of the 2026 AI market.

Capital bets on AI without looking back

Bloomberg describes what is happening as a global bet of unprecedented scale:

• Anthropic at $965 billion is potentially the most valuable AI IPO in history
• Amazon and Google have together invested more than $12 billion in the company
• OpenAI, xAI, Mistral and Cohere are raising tens of billions of dollars in parallel
• Sovereign funds from the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Japan are actively entering AI deals
• Corporate AI budgets roughly doubled on average in 2025–2026

This concentrated flow of capital creates systemic pressure: the pace of new model and product releases is increasingly set by investor expectations, not just by users' real needs.

Voter anxiety remains unanswered

While investors break records, public sentiment looks very different. Polls in the US, the EU and key Asian countries show that most citizens support AI development in principle but are increasingly worried about its consequences: job losses, power concentrated in a few corporations and a lack of real democratic oversight. The anxiety is especially sharp in election periods, when AI becomes a political issue.

Neither the skepticism nor protests by unions and industry groups have so far turned into political pressure capable of actually slowing the pace. Regulators in the EU with the AI Act, the US Congress and Asian regulators are moving far more slowly than the market, failing to write rules where the technology is already in use.

"We are seeing a classic gap between the speed of capital and the speed of democracy,"

Bloomberg's authors note.

What this means

Anthropic's move to the public market at a valuation comparable to the market capitalization of the world's largest banks sets a new benchmark for the whole industry. For millions of ordinary investors, it opens a first chance to buy a stake in the race that will define the next decade. At the same time, public-market pressure on monetization and growth will sharply intensify: quarterly reports show no mercy.

The next 12 months will show whether the generative AI business model can bear the weight of these expectations, or whether capital finally collides with a reality it has preferred to ignore for too long.