Will OpenAI or Anthropic IPO first?

OpenAI has several structural advantages in the race to go public first: it is the larger, more visible company, it has broader product distribution, and it is likely to face heavier capital and governance demands as it scales. Those pressures can make a public listing more attractive once growth slows enough to support public-market scrutiny. Anthropic is also a major private AI leader, but it appears more conservatively managed and may have less incentive to rush into the public markets if private financing remains abundant.

The main reason to be cautious is that IPO timing in frontier AI is driven less by product momentum than by control, regulatory, and financing considerations. Both firms can raise very large private rounds, both are operating in a field with high strategic sensitivity, and both may prefer to preserve flexibility rather than accept quarterly public-market constraints. That means the question is not simply which company is bigger today, but which management team decides that public capital and liquidity outweigh the costs.

At 0.96, the market is pricing OpenAI-first as almost a foregone conclusion. I think that overstates the certainty. OpenAI is still the likelier first mover, but the gap is narrower than the market implies because Anthropic could choose an earlier listing if it wants a cleaner governance structure, if its backers push for liquidity, or if OpenAI’s complex cap table and nonprofit-linked structure delay it further. The market looks directionally right but too confident.