Background: Anthropic is the AI company behind Claude, the chatbot giving ChatGPT a serious run for its money. It was founded in 2021 by Dario Amodei and a group of researchers who left OpenAI to build a rival AI lab. And 2026 has been a huge year for Anthropic: the company has rolled out products including Claude Cowork, Claude Code, and Claude Design, while Claude's website traffic jumped eleven-fold during 2025.

What happened: Anthropic has confidentially filed for an IPO with a valuation of $965 billion USD... That's roughly $1.3 trillion AUD... And this makes it even more valuable than OpenAI, which was last valued at $852 billion USD following its fundraising round in March.  

What else: To put that valuation into perspective, Anthropic is only five years old and is already worth more than CBA, NAB, ANZ, Westpac, and Macquarie combined. Its annualised revenue has reportedly surged from $9 billion USD at the end of 2025 to $47 billion USD today, in just six months. Now it's beaten OpenAI to set the precedence for AI IPO's... by filing first.

What's the key learning?

💡 The first company in a new industry gets to write the rulebook that every competitor gets graded against. First-mover advantage isn't just about arriving first - it's about setting the valuation benchmark, the growth benchmark, the narrative, and the yardstick that every competitor gets measured against.

💡 By filing first, Anthropic gets to define what an AI company should look like to public market investors. nd by the time OpenAI files, investors will already have an Anthropic benchmark in their heads.

💡 History shows the second company often gets compared to the first. Snap's 2017 IPO was constantly measured against Facebook, which had already defined what a successful social media company looked like. Snap never recovered to its IPO-day high, while Facebook (now Meta) grew into a $1.5 trillion USD giant.