Anthropic is considering the release of a new artificial intelligence model as its rivalry with OpenAI intensifies and the company prepares for a possible initial public offering that could value it at close to $2 trillion. The deliberations come at a moment of shifting momentum in enterprise AI, where OpenAI's newest model has begun to challenge Anthropic's position in some usage metrics even as Anthropic maintains a substantially larger revenue base.

November IPO Under Discussion

According to Reuters, Anthropic is reviewing the timing of a new model launch following the debut of OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra on September 3. The decision comes as the company positions itself for a potential public listing, with separate reporting indicating November as the target window.

Terms under discussion could value Anthropic at approximately $2 trillion and raise as much as $100 billion, though those figures have not been finalized. If completed at the described scale, the offering would rank among the largest initial public offerings on record, though IPO terms typically become definitive only once a company files a public registration statement. Reporting attributed to the Wall Street Journal indicated the company plans to proceed despite AI safety concerns.

BREAKING: Anthropic is planning to launch its IPO in November despite AI safety concerns, per WSJ. The company is expected to IPO at a $2 trillion valuation and raise up to $100 billion in the offering. Anthropic is expected to reach more than $110 billion in annualized revenue…

— The Kobeissi Letter (@KobeissiLetter) September 18, 2026

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Commentary around the listing has also drawn responses from industry figures:

Take the Leap, @Anthropic

There's been a lot of debate about whether now is the right moment for Anthropic to complete its IPO. Markets are jittery, the calendar is crowded, the valuation conversation is loud. And most importantly, there are valid, serious concerns about the…

— Jeremy Allaire (@jerallaire) September 18, 2026

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OpenAI Gains Ground With GPT-6 Astra

OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra has built traction among business users since its launch, positioning it as a direct challenger to Anthropic's Claude models in corporate accounts. Data from corporate expense platform Ramp showed Astra accounted for about 13% of the enterprise AI spending it tracks, while Anthropic's Claude Fable accounted for around 8%. As platform-level samples, such figures reflect the spending of each platform's own users rather than the market as a whole.

OpenAI also moved ahead of Anthropic on OpenRouter last week. Users of the developer platform spent more on OpenAI models than on Anthropic models for the first time in more than two and a half years, marking a notable shift in developer spending patterns.

Anthropic still holds a larger reported annualized revenue run rate — a metric that extrapolates a recent period of revenue across a full year. Its annualized revenue exceeded $65 billion by the end of July, Reuters reported, compared with about $9 billion at the end of 2025. OpenAI's annualized revenue run rate passed $40 billion in July.

Anthropic has reportedly projected revenue of roughly $190 billion to $200 billion in 2028. Investors cited in separate reporting expect its annualized revenue rate could exceed $110 billion by the end of 2026.

Safety Review, Computing Costs and Rivals

Anthropic is evaluating the safety of its next model while deciding when to release it, according to Reuters. No launch date has been specified. That decision follows a September 12 call by CEO Dario Amodei for AI developers to slow the pace at which model capabilities improve. The company must balance spending on new models with efforts to improve profitability as computing costs remain high; training and serving frontier-scale models depends on specialized computing infrastructure that ranks among the industry's largest expense categories.

The IPO could be pushed until after the U.S. midterm elections in November, although Reuters reported that the election itself is not expected to have a major effect on the offering. No public registration statement has yet confirmed the exchange, ticker, underwriting banks or number of shares for an Anthropic IPO, and the company has not publicly confirmed any of the reported terms. A public filing would be the first formal confirmation of the offering's structure and size.

Competitive pressure is emerging from other directions as well. Meta Platforms is reportedly seeking to reduce its use of Anthropic models as it develops more AI capabilities internally, while open-source and open-weight models offer companies a way to run more AI workloads without relying on major commercial providers.

For now, Anthropic is weighing a new model launch while preparing for a possible November IPO. The company has not confirmed a final launch date, IPO valuation or offering size, and the picture should come into focus through concrete markers: any public registration statement, an announced model launch, and how reported annualized revenue tracks against the expectations investors have cited for the end of 2026.

Source: CoinCentral