**Anthropic has quietly assembled the cleanest financial story in frontier AI — and is now preparing to take it to Wall Street.**

The Claude AI maker has become the revenue leader in artificial intelligence, on track for roughly $47 billion in annualized revenue and reportedly profitable in 2026. The milestone, driven largely by Claude Code and enterprise adoption, positions Anthropic strikingly differently from rivals as it approaches an IPO expected as early as October.

Custom chip talks with Samsung

According to The Information, Anthropic has begun early-stage work on its own AI chip and has held talks with Samsung Electronics as a potential manufacturing partner. The move follows the same playbook as Google, Amazon, Meta, and OpenAI — all of whom are designing custom silicon to reduce dependence on Nvidia and cut the massive compute costs that dominate AI companies' expenses.

A custom chip would be particularly strategic for Anthropic. The company's biggest single cost is compute, and manufacturing its own silicon — tuned specifically for Claude models — would both reduce that expense and insulate it from the supply constraints that recently forced Google to ration capacity to Meta.

The IPO picture

Anthropic confidentially submitted a draft S-1 to the SEC on June 1, 2026, shifting its IPO from rumor to formal regulatory process. The company is targeting a public listing on the Nasdaq as early as October 2026 at a post-money valuation of roughly $965 billion — following a $65 billion Series H round in May that valued it at that level.

The contrast with OpenAI's parallel path to public markets is striking. Both companies are expected to go public this fall, but they are offering investors fundamentally different stories.

Anthropic goes in as the profitable enterprise leader with locked-in compute deals and predictable revenue. OpenAI goes in as the consumer giant with a $42.6 billion government-stake proposal, an active lawsuit from Apple, and a larger valuation to justify.

The disciplined approach

Anthropic has spent 2026 making methodical, disciplined moves while rivals captured headlines. In addition to the chip talks and IPO filing, the company has locked in long-term compute agreements and expanded its enterprise footprint through Claude Code, which developers have adopted at scale for coding assistance.

The strategy appears to be working. By focusing on enterprise contracts rather than consumer virality, Anthropic has built recurring revenue that investors prize — exactly the profile Wall Street rewards in a tech IPO.

For the AI industry, Anthropic's ascent marks a subtle but significant shift. While OpenAI defined AI through ChatGPT's consumer explosion, Anthropic is proving there is a parallel path to dominance: sell to businesses, control your costs, and let the balance sheet do the talking.

Sources