Anthropic Files for IPO at $965 Billion Valuation, Racing OpenAI to Public Markets
Anthropic's IPO filing and new model release, alongside MiniMax's benchmark-beating model, underscore an accelerating race for market dominance and technological leadership among AI labs.
The story
The AI landscape saw significant movement as Anthropic confidentially filed for an Initial Public Offering with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission this week. This move positions the Claude maker at a staggering $965 billion valuation, placing it ahead of OpenAI in the race to public markets. The filing follows a substantial $65 billion Series H funding round, which the company stated would support Claude development, safety research, and infrastructure expansion. Simultaneously, Anthropic released its upgraded Claude Opus 4.8 model, boasting enhanced capabilities in coding and agentic tasks. Across the globe, Chinese AI startup MiniMax debuted its M3 large language model, claiming to surpass OpenAI's GPT-5.5 and Google's Gemini 3.1 Pro on key benchmarks while offering a significantly lower cost. This highlights the intensifying competition from international players. Meanwhile, NVIDIA announced that its Vera Rubin platform is ramping into full production, providing crucial infrastructure for agentic AI factories worldwide. These developments collectively indicate a dynamic period of innovation and strategic positioning as AI labs push both technological boundaries and market accessibility.
Who moved
Anthropic
What Changed: The company confidentially filed for an Initial Public Offering (IPO) with the SEC and recently secured $65 billion in Series H funding, valuing it at $965 billion.
Consequence: This move positions Anthropic as a frontrunner in the public market race, surpassing OpenAI in valuation and readiness for a public listing.
MiniMax
What Changed: The Chinese AI startup released its M3 large language model, which claims to outperform GPT-5.5 and Gemini 3.1 Pro on certain benchmarks at a fraction of the cost.
Consequence: MiniMax is challenging established Western AI labs on both performance and pricing, indicating a rising competitive force from Asian players.
NVIDIA
What Changed: NVIDIA announced that its Vera Rubin platform is ramping into full production to power agentic AI factories globally.
Consequence: This provides essential hardware and infrastructure, supporting the widespread development and deployment of next-generation AI agents.
Inherent
What Changed: This London-based AI lab, founded by former DeepMind researchers, emerged from stealth with a $50 million funding round.
Consequence: The funding will be used to develop its 'AI-native science' platform, Faraday, aiming to combine human scientific research with advanced AI systems.
Airis Labs
What Changed: The Israeli AI defense-tech company emerged from stealth, announcing it has raised $60 million in total funding, including a $31 million Series B round.
Consequence: The capital will be used to expand US operations, hire new employees, and accelerate product development in turning visual data into machine-readable intelligence.
Cars24
What Changed: The Indian pre-owned car platform launched its AI Labs initiative with a $20 million investment.
Consequence: This investment aims to foster AI innovation, support AI-first products, and back ambitious founders in the AI space.
New models
Claude Opus 4.8
Lab: Anthropic
What: An upgraded version of Claude Opus with improved coding, agentic skills, reasoning, and practical knowledge work.
Use: Designed for enterprise users and developers to enhance collaboration and tackle complex tasks like translation, deep research, and analysis.
MiniMax-M3
Lab: MiniMax
What: A large language model offering frontier-tier coding and agentic performance, a 1-million-token context window, and native multimodality at a low cost.
Use: Available via API with plans for an open-source release, it aims to provide powerful, cost-effective AI capabilities for developers and enterprises.
Cosmos 3
Lab: NVIDIA
What: An open physical AI foundation model built on a mixture-of-transformers architecture for physical AI reasoning, world simulation, and action generation.
Use: It offers options for various stages of physical AI development, from post-training robotics to rapid video and action reasoning.
Market signals
Anthropic closed a $65 billion Series H funding round, pushing its valuation to $965 billion, making it the most valuable AI startup.
Implication: This signifies immense investor confidence in generative AI, particularly in Anthropic's enterprise-focused strategy, and fuels its rapid path toward an IPO.
Anthropic confidentially filed for an Initial Public Offering (IPO) with the SEC.
Implication: This initiates a direct race with OpenAI and SpaceX for public listing at near-trillion-dollar valuations, potentially setting market precedents for frontier AI labs.
London-based AI lab Inherent, founded by ex-DeepMind researchers, raised $50 million in a round led by Index Ventures and Radical Ventures.
Implication: This demonstrates continued venture capital interest in specialized AI applications, particularly those focused on 'AI-native science' and deep research.
Israeli AI defense-tech company Airis Labs emerged from stealth with $60 million in total funding, including a $31 million Series B led by PSG Equity.
Implication: Significant investment is flowing into AI for defense and national security, focusing on converting unstructured visual data into actionable intelligence.
Indian pre-owned car platform Cars24 launched its AI Labs initiative with a $20 million investment.
Implication: This reflects a growing trend of established companies investing in internal AI innovation hubs and supporting external AI startups to drive AI-first product development and open-source contributions.
Builders saying
Andrej Karpathy, AI Researcher. He joined Anthropic, expressing excitement for the particularly formative next few years at the frontier of large language models.
Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind. He warned that AI represents a 'species-level transition' with little margin for error and advocated for coordinated international regulation within five to ten years.
Yann LeCun, Chief AI Scientist at Meta. He reiterated his view that current large language models are merely statistical machines and do not possess true intelligence, contrasting with AGI claims from other leaders.
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI. He continues to discuss the imminent creation of AGI, which he describes as a major step towards general artificial intelligence.
What we'll be watching
- OpenAI's DevDay is scheduled for September 29 in San Francisco, where CEO Sam Altman is expected to unveil new products and a vision for AI's future.
- Anthropic is expected to make its public S-1 disclosure following its confidential IPO filing, which will provide detailed financial insights into a frontier AI lab.
- MiniMax plans to release its M3 model under an open-source license with open weights within the next 10 days.
- Elon Musk's xAI, part of SpaceX, is preparing for an IPO next week, which could be the largest in history.
- Production shipments of NVIDIA's Vera Rubin platform are set to begin this fall, bolstering global AI infrastructure.
- AMD AI DevDay 2026 will bring together engineers and developers for technical sessions and workshops focused on optimizing AI workloads across AMD platforms.
- AnyMind Group will establish its AnyAI Lab in Hangzhou, China, in June 2026, focusing on advanced AI agent development and application.
Reporting + analyst voices: grounded via Google Search at publish time.