Show Your Work
Anthropic and OpenAI have entered the IPO pipeline, and their S-1 filings will reveal economics the industry has only ever narrated on its own terms.
Last week produced Microsoft’s first in-house reasoning model, NVIDIA’s entry into the laptop processor market, a 269-page bipartisan AI bill in Congress, and a redesigned memory architecture for ChatGPT. Apple’s WWDC keynote opens this morning with a rebuilt, Gemini-powered Siri expected to headline. Amid all of this, the two most valuable private AI companies entered the IPO pipeline.
Three titanic filings
SpaceX launched its investor roadshow last Thursday, with pricing scheduled for this Wednesday and a Nasdaq debut under the ticker SPCX expected Thursday. Anthropic submitted a confidential draft S-1 to the SEC on June 1, three days after closing a $65 billion Series H that valued the company at $965 billion. OpenAI is reportedly preparing its own confidential filing with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, targeting a listing as early as September.
SpaceX has set a fixed offering price of $135 per share, targeting a $75 billion raise at a $1.75 trillion valuation, which would make it the largest IPO in history by deal size. Saudi Aramco’s 2019 listing, the previous record, raised $25.6 billion. Anthropic and OpenAI have not disclosed offering details, but both companies carry private-market valuations near or above $1 trillion, figures that emerged from funding rounds and that public markets have not yet priced.
Metrics massaged
Anthropic has disclosed run-rate revenue at each of its fundraising milestones this year. The company reported $14 billion in February at its Series G, $30 billion in April after announcing an expanded Google and Broadcom partnership, and $47 billion at the Series H in late May. A Meritech Capital analysis of over two hundred software-company IPOs found no comparable growth trajectory, and the figures have accelerated since that assessment in 2025. Each figure represents the most recent month’s revenue multiplied by twelve, a standard metric that captures growth momentum at a single point in time.
OpenAI has followed a similar disclosure cadence. Its annualized revenue crossed $20 billion by the end of 2025, and the company was reporting roughly $2 billion per month by its March 2026 funding round, which raised $122 billion at an $852 billion valuation. Both companies have shared topline growth rates while leaving cost of revenue, inference expenses, and net losses unreported. Gross margins, capital expenditure schedules, customer concentration risk, and the contractual terms of compute partnerships remain invisible to anyone outside the cap table. The AI industry’s financial portrait, as presented to investors, has consisted almost entirely of revenue acceleration curves timed to coincide with capital raises.
The books are opened
SpaceX’s public S-1, released May 20, previewed the level of disclosure that awaits the AI labs. The filing showed $18.7 billion in consolidated 2025 revenue alongside a $4.94 billion net loss and adjusted EBITDA of $6.58 billion, a level of detail that had never appeared in SpaceX’s private transactions.