SpaceX has grabbed headlines as it heads toward its blockbuster initial public offering (IPO) on June 12. According to the latest reports, it's targeting an initial share price of $135 and a valuation of $1.75 trillion. That would instantly make it one of the largest public companies on earth.
While many investors are excited about SpaceX (and understandably so), I've got my eye on a different IPO that could hit later this year. On June 1, Anthropic confidentially filed its S-1 with the Securities and Exchange Commission, a key preliminary step in the process of going public. SpaceX filed its S-1 with the regulator on April 1. So, if their timelines are similar, that means we could have an Anthropic IPO sometime in the next two to three months.
I'm far more interested in the potential of Anthropic's IPO, and I think most investors should be as well. Anthropic gives us a view into a pure generative AI company While SpaceX owns xAI and its Grok large language model, it also has other assets. The most profitable is Starlink, its satellite internet business, but other space exploration costs crowd out the xAI part of the business.
Additionally, Grok isn't on the same level as Claude for integrated business use. Anthropic's Claude has quickly vaulted into the leadership position as the preferred large language model for coding. In an April announcement regarding Anthropic's computing agreement with Alphabet (GOOG +3.87%) (GOOGL +3.77%), Anthropic noted that its annual revenue run rate had exceeded $30 billion. At the end of 2025, Anthropic's run rate was just $9 billion.
That's a huge acceleration in growth, and since then, its run rate may have crossed the $40 billion mark. Anthropic likely won't be as big as SpaceX when it goes public, but it could be close. At the end of May, it closed a Series H funding round that valued it at $965 billion, and its IPO market cap could be far higher depending on the demand for the stock. With Anthropic likely to be the first pure-play generative AI company to go public, it will garner massive investor attention.
Furthermore, the price tag doesn't seem too outrageous. If Anthropic went public at a valuation of $1 trillion and had annual revenues of $30 billion, the stock would trade at 33 times its annual run rate. SpaceX generated just $18.7 billion in revenue in 2025. With Anthropic carrying a market cap that's a bit more than half of SpaceX's, but having a considerably larger revenue base, it would be a far cheaper stock on a price-to-sales basis.
That's why I'm more excited about its IPO than the SpaceX IPO.