6.5 trillion, the largest AI company in history is going to IPO
Anthropic has "beaten" OpenAI once again.
On June 1st local time, Anthropic announced that it had secretly submitted an S-1 prospectus to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and planned to push for the company's public listing. In addition to Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceX are also accelerating their IPO processes.
This also means that after this large model company founded by former OpenAI employees surpassed OpenAI's valuation of $852 billion with a valuation of $965 billion (approximately 65 trillion RMB) and became the world's number one, it has also taken the lead in officially embarking on the IPO path ahead of the latter.
From Zhipu and MiniMax, which have already gone public, to Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX, which are in the process of advancing their IPOs, in 2026, we will not only witness the birth of a group of super-rich individuals but also see many AI practitioners achieve financial freedom.
Although people have never underestimated the wealth - creating effect of AI, the scale of this global wave is still extremely shocking.
Brother - sister partnership in entrepreneurship: Anthropic surpasses OpenAI
It only took Anthropic a little over five years from its establishment to its upcoming listing.
Back in early 2021, feeling OpenAI's accelerated commercialization and its neglect of AI safety, Dario Amodei and his sister Daniela Amodei, who had differences in the company's development direction, founded Anthropic and were determined to make AI safer and more responsible.
This is closely related to the siblings' experiences. Dario Amodei was born in the United States in 1983. After graduating from universities such as Stanford, Caltech, and Princeton, he worked at companies like Baidu and Google and joined the newly - established OpenAI in 2016, where he was responsible for the company's safety and led the team in developing GPT - 2 and GPT - 3.
Two years later, following in her brother's footsteps, Daniela Amodei also joined OpenAI and eventually became the vice - president in charge of safety and policy. After being born in 1987, she studied English literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and also worked at fintech companies like Stripe.
It's not just this brother - sister pair. Former OpenAI employees such as Tom Brown, Jack Clark, Jared Kaplan, Sam McCandlish, and Christopher Olah also had similar ideas. Eventually, they all left OpenAI and chose to join Anthropic, becoming the company's founding team.
At its inception, Anthropic positioned itself as an artificial intelligence safety and research company, committed to building reliable, interpretable, and controllable AI systems. The reason for naming the company Anthropic is that the word itself means "related to humans".
Different from OpenAI, which focuses on C - end users through ChatGPT, Anthropic focuses on enterprise customers with Claude. After releasing the AI dialogue system Claude, similar to ChatGPT, in March 2023, they accelerated the iterative upgrade of the Claude large model and quickly caught up with and even surpassed competing models such as OpenAI's GPT and Google's Gemini.
Not long ago, Anthropic released the latest generation of large model, Claude Opus 4.8. As the model with the largest number of parameters in the Claude model series, Claude Opus 4.8 far exceeds OpenAI's GPT - 5.5 in many capabilities in tests such as programming, agent capabilities, and logical reasoning.
Although its capabilities are stronger than the previous - generation model, the price of their API remains unchanged. The prices for input tokens and output tokens are $5 and $25 per million respectively. More importantly, the market's recognition of Claude is very high, which directly drives Anthropic's annual recurring revenue (ARR) to soar.
According to Dario Amodei, since Anthropic received its first revenue, its annual revenue has increased by about 10 times. In 2022, their ARR was about $10 million. By December 2024, this amount reached about $1 billion. By early May 2026, the company's annualized revenue exceeded $47 billion.
According to Anthropic's forecast, the company is expected to achieve operating profit for the first time in the second quarter of 2026, with a profit of about $559 million. In contrast, OpenAI's expected situation is that even if its revenue increases significantly in 2028, the company will still incur a loss of $85 billion that year and may not achieve overall break - even until 2030.
This also means that Anthropic, founded by former OpenAI employees, will most likely achieve profitability earlier than OpenAI.
A valuation of 6.5 trillion yuan: A "new king" among global AI companies is born
Looking back at Anthropic's development history, with the support of a star - studded entrepreneurial team, combined with solid technology and products, as well as remarkable commercial performance, this company has won the favor of many investors along the way.
Not long after its establishment, they received $124 million from Skype co - founder Jaan Tallinn, Facebook co - founder Dustin Moskovitz, former Google chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt, etc. In April 2022, the company completed a $580 million financing round.
Since 2023, Anthropic has entered a period of rapid financing. At that time, although OpenAI, backed by Microsoft, had just released ChatGPT, this AI chatbot had 100 million monthly active users within two months of its launch, thus triggering a global AI wave.
So we can see that the company received a $300 million investment from Google in February of that year. Three months later, Anthropic completed a $450 million Series C financing round led by Spark Capital, and its valuation reached $4.1 billion. In September 2023, Amazon announced an investment of $4 billion in them. Immediately afterwards, Google decided to make an additional investment of $2 billion in the company.
The large amount of capital has enabled Anthropic to achieve rapid development. After completing a $750 million investment led by Menlo Ventures, they quickly released the Claude 3 model family in March 2024, for the first time introducing multi - modal capabilities that can process and analyze data types such as documents, images, and videos. Eight months later, Amazon, which had become an important cloud service provider for Anthropic, invested another $4 billion in them.
In the month after the launch of Claude 3.7 Sonnet, the first hybrid reasoning model in the market, Anthropic received $3.5 billion from Lightspeed, Bessemer Venture Partners, Cisco Investments, D1 Capital, Fidelity Management & Research Company, General Catalyst, Jane Street Capital, Salesforce Ventures, etc. in March 2025.
At that time, although their valuation reached $61.5 billion, there was still a large gap compared with OpenAI. In a chasing position, Anthropic completed a $13 billion Series F financing round six months later. With the support of ICONIQ, Fidelity, Lightspeed, Blackstone, Goldman Sachs, Qatar Investment Authority, etc., the company's valuation soared to $183 billion.
As time passed, Anthropic completed two rounds of super - large - scale financing in 2026. In February when its annualized revenue reached $14 billion, the company received a $30 billion investment from the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation (GIC), Coatue, Google, Amazon, Sequoia Capital, Temasek, Microsoft, NVIDIA, etc.
Three months later, they announced the completion of a $65 billion Series H financing round, with investors including Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, Sequoia Capital, Capital Group, Coatue, D1 Capital, the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation (GIC), Blackstone, DST Global, MGX, Lightspeed, Amazon, Micron, Samsung, SK Hynix, etc.
It was during this process that Anthropic's valuation soared from $380 billion to $965 billion (approximately 6.5 trillion RMB), finally surpassing OpenAI's valuation of $852 billion and officially becoming the world's most highly - valued AI startup.
The AI wealth - creating wave: A group of people achieve financial freedom
This global AI revolution is rapidly forming a shocking wealth - creating wave.
Without any surprises, these three giants will collectively enter the capital market in 2026, with a total fundraising scale exceeding $200 billion.
Among them, SpaceX is the fastest - moving one and will have the largest - scale IPO in history. According to media reports, they are expected to go public on June 12th and will raise $75 billion at a price of $135 per share, corresponding to a market value of $1.77 trillion.
Looking through the prospectus, the total capital received by SpaceX is about $10 billion. If the stock price stabilizes after the IPO, in addition to bringing an average return of more than a hundred times to all shareholders, this company will also make Elon Musk the first super - rich person in history with a net worth of up to $1 trillion.
Although the seven co - founders, including Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei, each hold less than 1% of the shares, Anthropic's high valuation of $965 billion still makes the value of each of their shareholdings reach about $8 billion. As these seven people simultaneously become among the world's top 500 richest people, it also sets a record for the largest number of people from the same company added to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index in a single day.
As for OpenAI, which ranks third in valuation, many employees have already successfully realized the value of their equity through an internal secondary - market stock sale. According to media reports, more than 600 current and former OpenAI employees cashed out a total of $6.6 billion in the autumn of 2025, and about 75 of them received $30 million each, truly becoming rich overnight.
Some domestic AI practitioners have also tasted the taste of getting rich overnight.
After going public in January 2026, the stock prices of domestic large - model leading companies Zhipu and MiniMax have also been on a long - term upward trend. Among them, Zhipu once surpassed Xiaomi during intraday trading, and its total market value once approached HK$900 billion; as for MiniMax, with a stock price of HK$1,330, it once became the highest - priced stock on the Hong Kong stock market.
Even though the stock prices have corrected somewhat, compared with the time of listing, the market values of Zhipu and MiniMax still have a multiple - level increase. As of the close on June 2nd, Zhipu's stock price has still risen by more than 10 times, and its market value exceeds HK$620 billion; at the same time, MiniMax's stock price has also risen by more than 3 times, and its market value exceeds HK$200 billion.
In addition to bringing dozens or even thousands of times of returns to investors, Zhipu has also enabled a group of employees to achieve financial freedom. Data shows that the employee shareholding platforms Huihui and Zhideng of this company have 426 and 25 limited partners respectively. Roughly calculated based on a market value of HK$620 billion, the market values of Huihui's and Zhideng's shareholdings exceed HK$46 billion and HK$32 billion respectively, which means that a group of employees and former employees have become multimillionaires or even billionaires.
The wealth - creating effect of MiniMax is also amazing. Even looking at a market value of HK$200 billion, this company, where almost all employees hold shares, not only brings more than a hundred times of returns to angel investors but also makes the total market value of the shareholdings of 363 ordinary employees exceed HK$6.8 billion, which is equivalent to an average market value of shareholdings of more than HK$18 million per person.
Not long ago, both Zhipu and MiniMax announced that they will list on the A - share market. From the current market environment, once these two companies are listed on the STAR Market, their market values are also highly anticipated. At the same time, domestic large - model companies with rapidly growing valuations, such as Yuezhianmian and Jieyuexingchen, are also advancing their IPOs.
It is foreseeable that a new wave of AI wealth - creation is accelerating. Maybe before long, another group of AI practitioners will achieve financial freedom.
This article is from the WeChat official account "Touzhongwang", author: Lu Zhigao. Republished by 36Kr with permission.