Anthropic's path from AI startup to industry-defining IPO

Sept 28 : Anthropic's IPO prospectus, reviewed by Reuters, laid out a sweeping vision in which AI would reshape the global economy more profoundly than industrialization, electricity and the internet, as the Claude maker moved closer to what could be the first listing by a frontier AI lab.

Here is a look at the road to the planned IPO: 

May 2021: 

Anthropic, led by siblings Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei, announces it has raised $124 million in a Series A funding round led by technology investor and Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn. 

April 2022: 

Anthropic raises $580 million in a Series B funding round. 

March 2023: 

The company releases a large language model, Claude, that competes directly with offerings from OpenAI.                  

May 2023: 

Anthropic raises $450 million from investors including Alphabet's Google and Spark Capital.         

September 2023: 

Amazon.com announces it will invest up to $4 billion in cash in Anthropic. 

October 2023: 

Alphabet's Google agrees to invest up to $2 billion in Anthropic.        

March 2024: 

Anthropic reveals a suite of AI models known as Claude 3. The company says the most capable in the family, Claude 3 Opus, outperforms rival models GPT-4 from OpenAI and Gemini 1.0 Ultra from Google on various benchmarks.

August 2024: 

Anthropic is hit with a class-action lawsuit in California federal court by three authors who say it misused their books and hundreds of thousands of others to train its AI-powered chatbot Claude.       

November 2024: 

Amazon.com pumps another $4 billion into Anthropic.             

March 2025: 

Anthropic raises $3.5 billion at a $61.5 billion post-money valuation led by Lightspeed Venture Partners.      

September 2025: 

Anthropic's valuation hits $183 billion post-money, after raising $13 billion in a new round.  

September 2025: 

Anthropic unveils the Claude 4.5 AI model, saying the newest version can code for longer uninterrupted stretches and handle finance and scientific tasks better.          

February 2026: 

The company raises $30 billion in a funding round, more than doubling the Claude chatbot maker's valuation to $380 billion. 

February 2026: 

U.S. President Donald Trump says he is directing the government to stop work with Anthropic, while the Pentagon said it would declare the startup a supply-chain risk.        

March 2026: 

Anthropic files a lawsuit to block the Pentagon from placing it on a national security blacklist, escalating the AI lab's high-stakes battle with the U.S. military over usage restrictions on its technology.  

April 2026: 

Anthropic debuts Mythos, its most advanced AI model to date, equipped with sophisticated capabilities and designed for defensive cybersecurity tasks.                       

May 2026:    

Anthropic announces it has raised $65 billion at a post-money valuation of $965 billion. 

June 2026: 

Anthropic confidentially files for a U.S. IPO, edging ahead of rival OpenAI in a closely watched race to reach public markets.   

July 2026: 

A federal judge in San Francisco signs off on Anthropic's landmark $1.5 billion settlement of a class-action lawsuit brought by a group of authors who accused it of misusing their books to train its AI chatbot Claude.        

August 2026: 

Independent music publisher Round Hill Music sues Anthropic and Suno in California federal court, alleging the AI companies misused hundreds of its songs to ​train their systems.

August 2026: 

Anthropic is projecting 2028 revenue of ‌roughly $190 billion to $200 billion, Reuters reports, citing sources. 

August 2026: 

Anthropic's annual revenue run rate topped $65 billion by the end of July, Reuters reports, citing a source.