Anthropic raised $65 billion in a funding round at a $965 billion valuation , eclipsing OpenAI for the first time. Three days later, the company confidentially filed its IPO prospectus with the SEC . If markets cooperate, the Claude developer could debut above $1 trillion this fall—making it one of the largest public offerings in history and the first AI lab to beat OpenAI to Wall Street.
The timing is no accident. Anthropic's advances in coding and cybersecurity capabilities have rattled markets and forced the Trump administration to reverse course on AI regulation. Claude Mythos Preview, an unreleased frontier model, can surpass all but the most skilled humans at finding and exploiting software vulnerabilities, and has already found thousands of high-severity vulnerabilities, including some in every major operating system and web browser . That capability—demonstrated in April—spooked Washington enough that President Trump signed an executive order on Tuesday asking AI companies to provide models to the federal government to assess their capabilities ahead of a full release .
The order is voluntary. The review window is thirty days, down from ninety in an earlier draft that Trump scrapped in May. And it explicitly states that nothing in the order shall authorize mandatory governmental licensing or preclearance for new AI models . But the fact that it exists at all marks a sharp turn for an administration that spent its first year dismantling Biden-era AI oversight.
What Changed the White House's Mind?
Mythos. In controlled evaluations where the model was explicitly directed and given network access, it could execute multi-stage attacks on vulnerable networks and discover and exploit vulnerabilities autonomously—tasks that would take human professionals days of work , according to the UK's AI Security Institute. Engineers with no formal security training were able to generate complete, working exploits , Anthropic reported.
Anthropic announced Claude Mythos Preview earlier this year, a model that excels at identifying weaknesses and security flaws within software, and limited the rollout to a select group of companies as part of Project Glasswing, which it expanded on Tuesday . The launch prompted several high-profile meetings between Anthropic and senior Trump officials, including the White House chief of staff and Treasury Secretary. The order arrived on the same day that Anthropic announced it is expanding the release of Mythos from roughly 50 to 200 organizations, and OpenAI announced its own cyber-capable system, GPT-5.5-Cyber .
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman met with lawmakers in Washington on Wednesday, including officials involved with the executive order, members of the Trump administration at the White House, and Republican and Democratic members of Congress, including House Speaker Mike Johnson and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries . Altman is urging Congress to reject proposals that would force developers to obtain federal sign-off ahead of a public launch, according to people familiar with his message . Instead, he wants more funding for AI testing at the US Department of Commerce, and he wants the government to add scientists with expertise in cybersecurity, biological weapons, and national security to that effort .
Johnson told CNBC he had a "very good, productive meeting" and described discussions about what a "light touch" regulatory framework should look like . The phrase is doing heavy lifting. What counts as "light touch" when a model can autonomously find zero-day exploits in Windows, macOS, and Chrome?
Can Anthropic Justify a Trillion-Dollar Valuation?
The numbers are striking. Anthropic's revenue run rate has ballooned to $47 billion, up from $10 billion in annual revenue last year —an 80-fold increase in annualized revenue, Fortune reported. Claude Code surpassed $1 billion in annualized revenue within six months of its launch, and over 1,000 customers now spend over $1 million annually on Claude, doubling from 500+ in under two months as of April .
That growth curve gave bankers confidence to anchor the IPO near $1 trillion. Wedbush analyst Dan Ives called Anthropic's move "an opening of the floodgates for the IPO market, which has been relatively dormant for a few years," with three major AI conglomerates set to go public later this year . SpaceX—which merged with Elon Musk's xAI in February—is preparing to debut next week at a $1.75 trillion valuation. OpenAI is readying its own confidential filing.
Patrick Corrigan, a law professor at Notre Dame who studies IPOs, said "I think we were all expecting OpenAI to go first, so it was a little bit surprising," adding that "public investors are going to be comparing them roughly around the same time, and so there seems to be a bit of a first movers' advantage here" .
The comparison to the dot-com era is unavoidable. Corrigan said the race resembles the rush by startups to go public in the early internet era, noting that "whenever there is speculation, there's also usually substance and fundamentals," but "the question here is whether the price investors are going to end up paying is going to match up to the substance and fundamentals of what AI is really going to do" .
