SpaceX, Anthropic: What to know about this year's blockbuster IPOs

Privately held tech companies led by big-name CEOs like Elon Musk and Sam Altman are expected to hit public markets over the coming months, giving investors a chance to own a piece of the potentially trillion-dollar firms.

SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic -- each of which touts an artificial-intelligence chatbot with millions of users -- are set for blockbuster initial public offerings (IPOs).

The IPOs provide an opportunity to raise fresh funds as the companies weather mounting costs for advanced chips and energy-intensive data centers. The firms will be subject to new scrutiny from public investors and regulators, however, which could fuel further backlash against them.

“This has turned into a race to reach public markets,” Dan Ives, a managing director of equity research at investment firm Wedbush, said in a memo to clients shared with ABC News, referring to the onrush of listings as an “opening of the floodgates.”

Here’s what to know about the tech IPOs.

Anthropic

Anthropic, the company behind chatbot Claude, filed confidentially for an IPO on Monday, setting the stage for its public listing, the company said.

The filing comes days after Anthropic announced a valuation of $965 billion, based on a recent fundraising round. The company said it has not set the number of shares or the price for a potential listing.

Anthropic triggered a selloff for some software stocks earlier this year after its release of new plugins for Claude Cowork, an AI-fueled workplace assistant that can author documents and organize files. The plugins allow customers to adapt the tool for narrow sectors like legal, finance or data marketing.

In April, Anthropic opted against releasing its latest model, Mythos, cautioning that the tool could be used to bypass cybersecurity protections across the internet. A preview of the model has since been released to 150 organizations.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said last year that AI could cut U.S. entry-level jobs in half by 2030.

SpaceX

Elon Musk-led rocket and satellite company SpaceX is seeking a valuation of $1.75 trillion, which would make it the world's ninth-largest company as measured by market capitalization.

Founded in 2002, SpaceX builds and operates spacecraft, including thousands of satellites deployed in support of its Starlink satellite internet service.

In February, the Texas-based firm merged with xAI, a Musk-led artificial-intelligence company that offers the chatbot Grok. SpaceX touted the merger as a key step in its plan to launch a fleet of "orbital data centers," satellites designed to deliver computing power, much like their terrestrial counterparts.

The company’s revenue jumped to $18.7 billion in 2025, soaring 33% compared to the previous year, a financial filing showed. Nearly a quarter of that revenue came from Starlink, which counted millions of subscribers. Still, SpaceX failed to turn a profit, registering a loss of $4.9 billion last year.

On Monday, Morningstar analysts Nicolas Owens and Suryansh Sharma praised SpaceX’s launch and satellite capabilities, highlighting “prodigious cost advantages achieved through continued research and development.”

Still, the analysts voiced skepticism about the firm’s other ventures, such as orbital data centers.

Such ambitions are “possible given the firm’s unique advantages, but their viability, timelines, and financial outcomes remain highly uncertain,” Owens and Sharma said in a blog post.

OpenAI

OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, is expected to file for an IPO over the coming weeks, Bloomberg reported last month.

ChatGPT set a record for the fastest-growing app user base after its release in 2022. It reached 100 million users within two months. The company has issued a series of updates to its signature product, including a personal finance component as recently as this month.

As of March, the app’s user base had ballooned to 900 million weekly active users, OpenAI said.

Still, the company expects to lose $14 billion in 2026 as it spends on energy and chips necessary for the technology, among other costs, The Information reported in January.

Last year, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman voiced mixed feelings about a potential IPO.

Altman appeared to balk at the shift in his role at the company. "Am I excited to be a public company CEO? 0%," Altman told the “Big Technology Podcast," but he noted the opportunity to raise additional funds.

"I do think it's cool that public markets get to participate in value creation," Altman added.