Will OpenAI or Anthropic IPO first?

The current reporting points strongly toward Anthropic listing before OpenAI. OpenAI’s CEO has now explicitly ruled out a 2026 IPO and has signaled 2027 or later, which is a meaningful delay for a company that would otherwise have been the default candidate to go first. By contrast, Anthropic is being described as actively preparing for a near-term debut, with reporting that it could move in late 2026. When one company is publicly pushing its timeline back while the other is still in a near-term readiness phase, the earlier listing edge shifts materially toward Anthropic.

OpenAI does have a confidential filing, but that is not enough to overcome the timing gap. Confidential S-1s are often a preparatory step and do not imply imminent pricing, especially when management is signaling caution and delays. Anthropic’s apparent readiness matters more here because the market is not asking which company eventually goes public, but which one gets there first. On the evidence available today, OpenAI would need to accelerate from its current posture or Anthropic would need to slip, and neither seems more likely than the reverse.

The market price implies the opposite view, with yes at 92%. That looks far too high unless the market is using a different interpretation of the question, because the live news flow is consistently bearish for OpenAI-first and supportive of Anthropic-first. If yes means OpenAI IPOs first, I would treat this as a strong mispricing; if the market is instead interpreting yes as simply “one of them IPOs before 2040,” then the contract would be much less informative and the quoted price would be easier to justify. Based on the wording and the surrounding context, the more natural interpretation is that yes corresponds to OpenAI being first, and under that reading the market looks sharply too optimistic.