Polymarket

Elon Musk

<img width="2560" height="1707" src="https://financefeeds.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/anthropic-900b-vs-openai-852b-who-lists-trillion-first-scaled.jpg" alt="Anthropic $900B vs OpenAI $852B: who lists the trillion first?" title="Anthropic $900B vs OpenAI $852B: who lists the trillion first? 88">
"OpenAI will list first because it filed first" is the lazy take. The actual numbers — Anthropic's last private mark of $900 billion versus OpenAI's $852 billion, Anthropic's $43 billion annualised revenue versus OpenAI's missed internal targets, Polymarket's 96% implied probability that Anthropic ends 2026 worth more than OpenAI — all point to a race where the company that files the S-1 second may close trading day one on a higher market cap. Both labs are circling the trillion-dollar mark, both are advised by Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, and the gap between the two is now wider on revenue ($43B vs sub-$30B) than on private valuation. The IPO race is no longer a coronation; it is a side-by-side test of two distinct enterprise-AI business models, and the crypto markets are pricing it more aggressively than the equity desks.
This piece walks through the live valuations, the public versus private revenue gap, the Polymarket and Hyperliquid markets already trading the race, and the structural reasons Anthropic's mark may sit above OpenAI's at the close of day-one trading even if OpenAI lists first. Having tracked private-market AI valuations since OpenAI's $80 billion 2023 round, the speed of the Anthropic catch-up — from $30 billion at end of 2025 to $900 billion in May 2026 — is the cleanest revenue-led valuation expansion in private-market history. The cross-industry parallel that matters is not another tech IPO; it is the 2010 LinkedIn vs Twitter race, where the smaller-by-private-mark company (LinkedIn) closed day-one higher than the louder name (Twitter, then private).
Key Facts:
<blockquote>
 • Anthropic last private mark: $900 billion+ pre-money (early talks to raise $30 billion+, May 2026), up from $380 billion post-money at the February 12, 2026 Series G close — <a href="https://www.techtimes.com/articles/317066/20260523/anthropic-funding-round-top-30b-900b-valuation-would-surpass-openai-most-valuable-ai-startup.htm" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">TechTimes, May 2026</a> • OpenAI last private mark: $852 billion (March 2026 $122B round backed by Amazon, Nvidia, SoftBank), with confidential S-1 filed May 22, 2026 targeting Q4 2026 listing — <a href="https://enterprisedna.co/resources/news/openai-ipo-confidential-filing-may-2026/" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">EnterpriseDNA, May 22, 2026</a> • Anthropic annualised revenue: $43 billion in April 2026, up from $9 billion at end of 2025 — <a href="https://sacra.com/c/anthropic/" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">Sacra, May 2026</a> • Polymarket: 96% implied probability Anthropic &gt; OpenAI valuation at some point in 2026; 75.5% probability OpenAI lists publicly before Anthropic — <a href="https://polymarket.com/event/will-anthropic-or-openai-ipo-first" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">Polymarket, May 26, 2026</a> • Polymarket OpenAI closing market cap above $800B at 89%, above $1T at 77%; Anthropic &gt;$600B by Dec 31, 2027 at 89% — <a href="https://polymarket.com/event/openai-ipo-closing-market-cap-above" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">Polymarket</a> • Nasdaq Private Market Anthropic price: $477.02 on May 5, 2026 (+1,500% year-on-year) — secondary-market valuation tracker • Underwriter overlap: Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley advising both; JPMorgan added on Anthropic — <a href="https://aitoolsrecap.com/Blog/openai-ipo-2026-valuation-timeline-what-investors-need-to-know" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">AI Tools Recap, May 2026</a>
</blockquote>
<h2 id="what-s-actually-happening-two-trillion-dollar-ipos-on-parallel-timelines">What's actually happening — two trillion-dollar IPOs on parallel timelines</h2>
OpenAI confidentially filed its S-1 with the US Securities and Exchange Commission on May 22, 2026, targeting a Q4 2026 listing at a valuation between $852 billion and $1 trillion (<a href="https://enterprisedna.co/resources/news/openai-ipo-confidential-filing-may-2026/" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">EnterpriseDNA filing summary, May 2026</a>). The confidential filing path lets OpenAI iterate on regulator comments without public disclosure of draft financials. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are advising. CFO Sarah Friar has publicly signalled the firm is "not yet ready for public markets" and favours a 2027 listing, but the May 22 confidential filing pulls the timeline forward.
Anthropic has not yet filed an S-1, confidential or public, but it has hired Wilson Sonsini, and Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Morgan Stanley are in early underwriter discussions. The company is targeting an October 2026 listing window — about six weeks before OpenAI's stated Q4 target — but the open question is whether Anthropic prefers to raise privately at $900 billion+ first or move directly to a public listing. <a href="https://financefeeds.com/anthropic-to-pay-spacex-1-25-billion-per-month-for-ai-compute-capacity/" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">The $1.25 billion-per-month compute deal Anthropic signed with SpaceX</a> on May 22, 2026 is, structurally, a partial answer: a company committing $15 billion of compute spend annually is signalling the balance-sheet weight that public markets reward.
The revenue divergence is the most underdiscussed driver. Sacra's analyst tracking has Anthropic at $43 billion in annualised revenue (April 2026), up from $9 billion at end of 2025 — a 4.8x compounded twelve-month expansion driven by 1,000+ enterprise customers spending $1 million+ per year. OpenAI has not disclosed audited figures since the March $122 billion round; missed internal revenue targets have been reported and the run-rate gap is the likely reason CFO Friar's stated preference is 2027 rather than Q4 2026.
The underwriter overlap matters. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are on both books; JPMorgan is added to Anthropic's syndicate. If both labs price in Q4 2026, the combined float would be the largest sector-concentrated equity issuance in tech IPO history — and the same desks running the SpaceX June 12 listing would have to absorb the Anthropic and OpenAI books months later. The institutional-allocation capacity constraint is the most underdiscussed structural risk to a parallel listing calendar.
<h2 id="industry-response-polymarket-hyperliquid-and-the-live-private-market-mark">Industry response — Polymarket, Hyperliquid, and the live private-market mark</h2>
The institutional crypto venues have moved faster than the equity-research desks. <a href="https://financefeeds.com/polymarket-expands-into-private-company-markets/" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">Polymarket launched its private-company prediction markets on May 19, 2026</a>, listing simultaneous contracts on Anthropic and OpenAI IPO timing, closing market cap, and head-to-head valuation. The 96% Polymarket probability that Anthropic ends 2026 worth more than OpenAI is the cleanest single-number expression of the race; it sits alongside a 75.5% probability that OpenAI lists publicly first.
The two numbers are not contradictory. They tell a coherent story: OpenAI gets to the listing bell first, but Anthropic catches and overtakes on private-market or post-listing valuation within the same year. The Polymarket spread between "OpenAI closing market cap above $800B" (89%) and "OpenAI closing market cap above $1T" (77%) implies an expected closing market cap in the $900B–$1.05T range. The equivalent Anthropic bucket — $600 billion+ closing market cap by Dec 31, 2027, at 89% — is wider because the Anthropic IPO date is more uncertain. <a href="https://financefeeds.com/binance-adds-openai-pre-ipo-perpetual-after-280m-spacex-run/" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">Binance's recently-launched OpenAI pre-IPO perpetual</a> sits parallel to these markets and Hyperliquid's HIP-3 framework (Trade.xyz) has signalled it will list Anthropic and OpenAI synthetic perpetuals once retail demand justifies them.
The Nasdaq Private Market price of $477.02 for Anthropic on May 5, 2026 — a 1,500%+ year-on-year increase — sits alongside the Polymarket 96% Anthropic-overtakes-OpenAI number as the second independent confirmation. Both markets price Anthropic as the higher-cap company within the same trading year. <a href="https://financefeeds.com/5-ways-crypto-markets-front-running-spacex-1-75t-ipo/" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">The same crypto-pricing dynamic that has already been observed for SpaceX's pre-IPO perpetual market</a> — where Hyperliquid's $202.89 SPCX-USDC settlement implies $2.4 trillion versus the S-1 target of $1.75 trillion — is repeating in the AI lab pair.
"24/7 crypto rails, leveraged positioning, and global participation can create faster consensus formation around late-stage private assets," said Matthew Pinnock, Chief Operating Officer at Altura DeFi (<a href="https://decrypt.co/368172/hyperliquid-defies-market-downturn-as-spacex-anthropic-openai-ipos-loom" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">Decrypt, May 18, 2026</a>). His framing is the cleanest argument for why prediction-market probabilities now lead, rather than lag, the consensus mark coming out of the institutional secondary market.
<h2 id="market-impact-and-data-the-revenue-deal-flow-and-underwriter-map">Market impact and data — the revenue, deal-flow, and underwriter map</h2>
The institutional read of the IPO race comes down to four data points: revenue, customer concentration, compute cost, and underwriter capacity. Three of the four favour Anthropic.
<table>
 <thead>
 <tr>
 <th>Metric</th>
 <th>Anthropic (May 2026)</th>
 <th>OpenAI (May 2026)</th>
 <th>Lead</th>
 </tr>
 </thead>
 <tbody>
 <tr>
 <td>Last private valuation</td>
 <td>$900B+ pre-money (early talks)</td>
 <td>$852B (March 2026 round)</td>
 <td>Anthropic +6%</td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>Annualised revenue (run-rate)</td>
 <td>$43B (Sacra, April 2026)</td>
 <td>Sub-$30B disclosed; missed internal targets</td>
 <td>Anthropic +43%+</td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>$1M+ ARR customers</td>
 <td>1,000+ (April 2026)</td>
 <td>Not publicly disclosed</td>
 <td>Anthropic</td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>Last private mark vintage</td>
 <td>Feb 2026 Series G ($380B post)</td>
 <td>March 2026 round ($852B)</td>
 <td>OpenAI more recent</td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>S-1 filing status (May 26)</td>
 <td>Not yet filed; underwriters in early talks</td>
 <td>Confidential S-1 filed May 22, 2026</td>
 <td>OpenAI ahead 4–8 weeks</td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>Underwriters</td>
 <td>Goldman, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley (early talks)</td>
 <td>Goldman, Morgan Stanley (advising)</td>
 <td>Tie</td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>Polymarket 2026 IPO probability</td>
 <td>~24% (75.5% imply OpenAI first)</td>
 <td>~75.5%</td>
 <td>OpenAI</td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>Polymarket 2026 higher valuation</td>
 <td>96%</td>
 <td>4%</td>
 <td>Anthropic</td>
 </tr>
 </tbody>
</table>
Sources: Sacra (Anthropic revenue), TechTimes (Anthropic valuation early talks), EnterpriseDNA (OpenAI filing), Polymarket public-market snapshots May 26, 2026, AI Tools Recap (underwriter list).
The cross-industry parallel that makes this race interesting is the 2010 LinkedIn vs Twitter situation in private secondary markets. LinkedIn, the boring B2B SaaS-style company, was widely considered the second-tier of the two; Twitter was the household name. When LinkedIn IPO'd in May 2011, it closed day-one at $94.25, more than double its IPO price, and traded at a higher market cap than Twitter's then-private mark. Anthropic plays the LinkedIn role here — the enterprise-revenue-led, less media-prominent of the pair, with a clearer pricing path. OpenAI plays the Twitter role: louder, higher headline-recognition, more uncertain on monetisation. The historical analogue is not precise — the AI labs are at radically different scale — but the structural set-up rhymes.
A second data-synthesis point: Anthropic's $43 billion annualised revenue against its $900 billion implied valuation produces a 20.9x sales multiple. OpenAI's sub-$30 billion annualised against $852 billion produces a 28.4x multiple. Both are high; only Anthropic's is defensible on contemporary AI-listed-comparable terms (Nvidia 28x, Palantir 90x). A market that prices Anthropic at a lower sales multiple than OpenAI, while assigning it higher absolute valuation, is signalling stronger comfort with the underlying revenue base.
<h2 id="regulatory-tension-the-spv-problem-the-sec-review-clock-and-the-legal-trap-landscape">Regulatory tension — the SPV problem, the SEC review clock, and the legal-trap landscape</h2>
The structural regulatory issue running through every parallel crypto market on both companies is the same: tokenised pre-IPO shares relying on Special Purpose Vehicles (SPVs) collapsed roughly 50% on the PreStocks venue last week after Anthropic and OpenAI confirmed that "share transfers made without the board's approval are void and carry no economic value" (statement language used by multiple private-company general-counsel responses, May 2026). That statement explicitly disclaims any token that purports to represent equity ownership through an SPV wrapper. Synthetic perpetuals (the Hyperliquid SPCX-USDC model) sidestep this because they confer no claim on the underlying shares — but they remain in regulatory grey territory for both the US Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
The clock on OpenAI's confidential filing matters here. SEC staff have 30 days to issue initial comments on a Form S-1; the company then has 21 days to respond. With the May 22 filing, the first comment letter lands around June 21, 2026, and the round-trip into a publicly-filed amended S-1 is plausible by August. Anthropic's parallel calendar — Wilson Sonsini advising, no filing yet — is at minimum 90 days behind OpenAI on the regulatory path.
The other open jurisdiction is the export-control file. <a href="https://financefeeds.com/white-house-overrides-pentagon-objection-to-finalize-nsa-deal-for-anthropic-ai-tools/" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">Anthropic's NSA deal, finalised after a White House override of Pentagon objections</a>, is a national-security positive for the company on the IPO disclosure narrative but a complication for any synthetic perpetual that prices Anthropic exposure to non-US traders. OpenAI does not currently carry the same NSA-tier classification risk but has its own export-licence exposure on the chip-procurement side (Nvidia GB200 allocations, the Microsoft-Azure compute envelope).
<h2 id="what-happens-next-three-concrete-predictions">What happens next — three concrete predictions</h2>
First, OpenAI publicly files an amended S-1 between August 1 and September 30, 2026, locking in the $900 billion–$1.05 trillion expected closing market cap range that Polymarket already prices. The mechanism: SEC comment-letter cycles on the confidential filing average 90–120 days into the public amendment; first comments due late June, second round by early August, public filing by Labour Day. A 75% Polymarket probability that OpenAI lists in 2026 is consistent with a September listing rather than the Q4 target Sarah Friar previously mentioned.
Second, Anthropic raises one more private round in July–September 2026 at $1 trillion+ pre-money, then files its own confidential S-1 in October. The mechanism: with $43 billion annualised revenue and 1,000+ million-dollar customers, the private market can support one more round; the company gets to publish the $1T+ mark before filing, locking in the narrative that it is now the higher-cap lab. October 2026 confidential filing puts a public listing in Q1 2027 — slightly after OpenAI's listing but with the higher private-mark precedent.
Third, by Dec 31, 2026, the Polymarket "Anthropic &gt; OpenAI 2026" market resolves YES at 96%+ implied probability, but only because Anthropic's private mark crosses $1 trillion before OpenAI's listed market cap settles above that level. The crypto-side perpetuals will be the cleanest place to express either side of that view, especially if Hyperliquid lists Anthropic and OpenAI synthetics in parallel before the equity prints arrive. <a href="https://financefeeds.com/hyperliquid-launches-canonical-prediction-markets-tied-to-offchain-events/" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">Hyperliquid's canonical prediction-market product</a>, paired with the HIP-3 perpetual framework, gives B2B participants a 24/7 venue to price the IPO race without waiting for SEC-comment-cycle outcomes.
<h2 id="faq">FAQ</h2>
Q: Has OpenAI officially confirmed its IPO date? A: Not publicly. The company confidentially filed its S-1 with the SEC on May 22, 2026 and is targeting a Q4 2026 listing, but CFO Sarah Friar has separately signalled a preference for 2027. The confidential-to-public S-1 timeline historically runs 90–120 days, putting a public amendment most likely in August–September 2026.
Q: How is Anthropic's $900 billion valuation justified at $43 billion of revenue? A: 20.9x sales — high but defensible against AI-comparable listed multiples (Nvidia ~28x, Palantir ~90x). The expansion from $9 billion to $43 billion annualised revenue in the trailing year underpins it; Anthropic also has 1,000+ enterprise customers spending $1M+ per year, doubling the prior six-month cohort.
Q: Who is the underwriter overlap, and does it matter? A: Both companies are advised by Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley; Anthropic adds JPMorgan. The overlap matters because the same syndicate desks would be running both books in Q4 2026, creating a capacity constraint on institutional allocations. Expect at least one syndicate to drop coverage on one of the two listings if the calendar overlap holds.
Q: Why does the Polymarket "96% Anthropic &gt; OpenAI" matter if it's just retail traders? A: Polymarket-listed private-company markets have hit institutional liquidity since the May 19 launch, with $13 million-plus open interest on the leading SpaceX market alone. The 96% number reflects more than retail; it is the cleanest single-number expression of a consensus that traditional secondary markets (Forge, EquityZen) also price the same way.
Q: Are the tokenised Anthropic and OpenAI shares safe to trade? A: No. SPV-backed tokens on PreStocks and similar venues fell roughly 50% last week after both companies issued statements that share transfers without board approval are void. Synthetic perpetuals (Hyperliquid HIP-3, Binance pre-IPO) confer no ownership claim and avoid the SPV legal risk, but remain in SEC/CFTC regulatory grey territory.
Q: What's the biggest single risk to the "Anthropic overtakes OpenAI" thesis? A: A material legal loss in the Elon Musk vs OpenAI litigation pushing Microsoft to renegotiate its compute partnership. That single event would compress OpenAI's valuation faster than Anthropic could close the gap from above. Watch the next Musk-OpenAI court date for the swing-factor catalyst.

Anthropic $900B vs OpenAI $852B: who lists the trillion…

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