AI giant Anthropic says it plans to list on US stock market

"The first mover has a real chance to define how public markets value Generative AI, setting up the yardstick that investors will use to measure everyone else."Harrison Rolfes, a research analyst a Pitchbook, added Anthropic's IPO "will be the most scrutinized public offering in tech history", with investors poring over its business margins, sales and profitability for signs that valuations and costs of AI make financial sense.By being so close to SpaceX's upcoming stock market debut, Rolfes said that the two companies "represent the largest concentration of pre-IPO capital ever brought to market simultaneously"."The 2026 window either becomes the most consequential IPO cycle since the dot-com era or the most expensive lesson in narrative-versus-fundamentals that public markets have ever taught," Rolfes said. Anthropic has been fighting this year, too, with the US Department of Defense (DoD).After the DoD late last year insisted that Anthropic should accept contractual terms as part of a $200m deal which stated government agencies could use AI tools like Claude for "any lawful use", Amodei made public his concerns.Although Claude was the first modern AI chatbot and model to be deployed on US government networks that were classified, the new contract language suggested to Anthropic the possibility of its AI being used in mass domestic surveillance or on fully-autonomous weapons of war.President Donald Trump denounced the company, and defense secretary Pete Hegseth quickly prohibited any US agency from using Claude.