OpenAI and Anthropic file confidential IPO drafts after SpaceX's historic debut
Anthropic filed its confidential S-1 draft on June 1, 2026, and OpenAI followed on June 8. Both AI giants, valued near $1 trillion, are aiming to go public in late 2026 or early 2027, with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley as shared advisers.
By Crypto Briefing · June 27, 2026.
The SpaceX domino effect is already transforming the tech IPO market. After filing its S-1 prospectus with the SEC in May 2026, Elon Musk's company has acted as a catalyst for the world's two most valuable artificial intelligence companies to accelerate their own public-listing processes. Anthropic filed its draft S-1 confidentially on June 1, 2026; OpenAI did so exactly one week later, on June 8. The timing is no coincidence.
**The SpaceX precedent**
SpaceX is shaping up to be what could be the largest IPO in history. The company is targeting a debut valuation of approximately $1.75 trillion, with an offering of around 555 million shares at $135 each. Demand has been overwhelming: according to the article, the shares were oversubscribed more than four times. SpaceX had initially filed a confidential draft in April before making its formal S-1 public the following month. The market logic is clear: when a company valued at nearly $2 trillion opens the door to the public markets, the rest of the sector's players rush to enter through it.
**Anthropic: nearly a trillion dollars before listing**
Anthropic's filing comes after a $65 billion Series H funding round that raised the company's valuation to $965 billion, brushing the trillion-dollar threshold even before its market debut. It is one of the highest private valuations ever recorded for a tech company. The fact that Anthropic chose to file its S-1 confidentially —a legal mechanism that allows companies to prepare their public listing without disclosing the details to the public until weeks before the debut— indicates that the process is still in its early stages but with a defined roadmap.
**OpenAI: direct competition for investor capital**
OpenAI, which has been immersed in its own structural transformation toward a for-profit model, filed its confidential draft on June 8, 2026, just one week after Anthropic. This places it in direct competition with its rival for the attention and capital of institutional investors. Expectations are that OpenAI's valuation at its market debut could approach or even exceed a trillion dollars, which would put it in a league occupied by only a handful of publicly traded companies worldwide.
**Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley: arbiters of an unprecedented race**
One of the most striking elements of this situation is that both companies are working with the same investment banks: Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. This creates a potential conflict-of-interest dynamic that the banks will have to manage carefully. They will have to distribute institutional investor interest across two offerings that compete directly with each other, and prevent one IPO from cannibalizing demand for the other. The concentration of advisory work in two firms for rival deals of this magnitude is unusual and adds an additional layer of complexity to the process.
**Timeline and dependence on the SpaceX effect**
The timing sequence of these three IPOs creates a chain of dependencies that investors must understand. SpaceX goes first, and its performance on the first day of trading and in the following weeks will directly determine how aggressively Anthropic and OpenAI can value their own offerings. If SpaceX debuts strongly and holds its price in the secondary market, investor appetite for high-growth tech assets will be reinforced. If, on the other hand, it suffers a post-debut decline, the environment for the two AI companies will be less favorable.
**Implications for agentic AI**
Overall, the public listings of Anthropic and OpenAI would have significant implications for the agentic AI ecosystem. Both companies are the leading providers of the language models on which most of the market's AI agents are built. Once listed, they will be subject to the quarterly pressure of financial results, which could accelerate the monetization of their APIs and agentic services, or else lead them to prioritize products with more immediate returns over long-term research. Developers building on these platforms will need to watch closely how commitments to public shareholders shape product and pricing decisions.
**No crypto component**
The article expressly notes that none of the three companies —SpaceX, Anthropic, or OpenAI— has any token or crypto-asset component in its offerings. This is pure traditional equity competition for the same growth capital that, in periods of lower corporate activity, tends to flow toward crypto markets. This is relevant for the blockchain ecosystem: a concentration of investor attention on these mega-deals could temporarily drain liquidity from digital assets during the debut months.
**Outlook**
The market debuts of Anthropic and OpenAI are projected for late 2026 or early 2027. If both valuations effectively exceed a trillion dollars, two companies from the same sector would have debuted at that scale in a very short period. The outcome will define not only the financial future of these companies, but also access to capital for the entire AI startup ecosystem in the years ahead.