Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Company‘s weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. I’m Mark Sullivan, a senior writer at Fast Company, covering emerging tech, AI, and tech policy.
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The real reasons Anthropic is IPO’ing first, and OpenAI later
Anthropic and OpenAI will be the first two pure-play AI companies to tap the public markets through an initial public offering. Anthropic will likely list its stock (ticker symbol: “ANT”) first, potentially on November 19, while analysts expect OpenAI, which filed its own IPO paperwork confidentially in June, to wait until early next year.
The timing of these IPOs matters a lot because both companies operate in an extremely expensive business, and they’re competing for capital from the same pool of retail and institutional investors. Both are trying to raise money at valuations well above a trillion dollars amid growing concerns about rising interest rates, volatility in technology stocks, heightened scrutiny of AI company valuations, and a decidedly negative political environment.
All about compute
Still, no artificial intelligence bubble has popped—yet—so Anthropic and OpenAI may want to go public while conditions are (relatively) good. Harrison Rolfes, an analyst at PitchBook, says it may also be a question of necessity. Both companies remain focused on buying, leasing, or building as much computing capacity as they can, even decades into the future. For a long time, they’ve relied on venture capital money and debt to cover those costs, but as private capital becomes harder to come by, they need to tap the public markets.
That may be a more urgent issue for Anthropic than for OpenAI. “The compute bills come due in December,” Rolfes tells Fast Company. Anthropic has shown impressive revenue growth during 2026, putting some real numbers behind the $1.2 trillion to $1.3 trillion valuation the company has proposed. “By being at this current valuation at this current time they can retain the interest and then run the momentum into the IPO,” Rolfes says.
OpenAI likely bought itself some time with the sizable capital it raised in the private markets this year, Rolfes believes. In March, the company raised $122 billion, and a recent Reuters report says OpenAI is trying to raise additional capital at a valuation of more than $1.4 trillion, locking down commitments before the Anthropic IPO. OpenAI also has a broader range of revenue sources than Anthropic, including consumer subscriptions, a growing advertising business, and licensing agreements with partners like Microsoft. OpenAI’s revenue reportedly grew more than 50% to over $10 billion in the third quarter.
A straight story
OpenAI will have to tell a clear and compelling story when it goes public—one that can withstand the scrutiny of the public markets. In fact, earlier this year, OpenAI’s CFO, Sara Friar, reportedly cited the lack of such a story as one reason her company wouldn’t be ready for a 2026 IPO.
“OpenAI’s timeline is different, and that makes sense given the company it’s building,” Jyoti Bansal, AI investor and founder of the software delivery platform Harness, tells Fast Company. “It has a different structure and a much broader business to run, spanning consumer, enterprise, infrastructure, and hardware.” OpenAI will have to clarify whether it’s primarily a consumer AI or an enterprise AI company, or how focusing equally on both could enhance and not limit overall growth in the future.
Anthropic, on the other hand, may have a slightly easier story to tell. “The business leans toward enterprise, and enterprise revenue is the kind public investors tend to value: recurring, tied to usage, and connected to real workflows,” Bansal says. “When customers are running your models in production, for coding, support and internal agents, you have a story that holds up under public-market scrutiny.”
First-mover advantage
Anthropic could see real benefits from going public first. It could set the terms by which public investors evaluate frontier AI company stocks, establishing a pricing benchmark and common metrics for measuring short- and long-term success.
This could put OpenAI in an uncomfortable position. “The $1.25 trillion that they are asking for will be compared to whatever Anthropic trades at,” Rolfes says. “So that’s the issue that OpenAI is going to face because now you have a comparable and if they can’t match that then it’s only going to cause them to get a larger discount on their value.” If OpenAI wants to command a higher valuation than Anthropic and raise more money, it will have to clearly explain to investors why it should be valued or measured differently.
OpenAI, remember, was seen as “the leading AI company” for years after the arrival of ChatGPT in late 2022. Much of that first-mover mojo is gone, but not all—it matters that millions of consumers had their first experience with AI through ChatGPT. Still, OpenAI could lose a little more mojo if it has to follow Anthropic to market.
“It puts them at a disadvantage in terms of listing first and capturing the mind share of people,” Rolfes says. “They used to be the go-to, but now if the name switches from OpenAI over to Anthropic, then it’s like, OK, maybe [Anthropic] will start to creep into the consumer mind share.”
The timing of an IPO doesn’t decide a company’s fate. In the long run, investors care more about quarter-to-quarter profitability and predictability. But pure-play AI companies are something new, and the timing of their IPOs may matter more. They have to spend unheard-of amounts of capital, some of it raised from the public markets, on infrastructure to stay competitive in the breakneck race to build state-of-the-art models. Any hiccup in plans to raise enough money for compute could leave an AI company behind in a race where catching up is exceedingly difficult. Meanwhile, its revenue opportunities—and potential shareholder returns—could shrink.
Anthropic’s new model built an operating system from an empty folder
In other Anthropic news, on Monday the AI giant released Claude Fable 5.2 and Claude Mythos 5.2, the same underlying model with different safeguards. In prerelease testing, the company says, an engineer asked Fable 5.2 to build a prototype operating system from an empty folder; it coordinated more than 1,000 subagents for eight days and produced one that boots on a laptop, with drivers, file storage, windows, a login screen, and an installer. Given a one-paragraph prompt, it also designed three working electronic devices—a voice-assistant hub, a USB speakerphone, and a handheld virtual pet—with circuit boards ready to manufacture in under a day.
Netflix is calling its recommendations AI
Netflix began rolling out AI Discover, its first consumer feature branded as AI-powered, to a limited number of U.S. subscribers on supported smart TVs, Variety reported. Subscribers can choose from preset themes such as “Something Light,” “Scare Me,” and “Family Movie Night.” A “Tune Your Recommendations” button lets viewers keep a suggestion or block it from appearing again. The content is not available on kids’ profiles. Netflix has used machine learning to recommend content for years; now it’s using it to generate content.
OpenAI’s quarterly revenue crossed $10 billion
OpenAI’s quarterly revenue topped $10 billion for the first time, Bloomberg reported, a jump of roughly 50% from $6.7 billion in the second quarter, and the company’s adjusted operating margin narrowed from negative 150% to negative 109%. OpenAI’s annual revenue run rate now stands at $50 billion. Anthropic reported third-quarter revenue of $17 billion and said this week its run rate had reached $81 billion as of the end of October. (Note: the two companies calculate revenues differently: Anthropic counts the total spend on Claude models through cloud partner distributors, while OpenAI reports only its piece of the revenue-share).
More AI coverage from Fast Company:
- Jensen Huang may be out at Nvidia: The rise and fall of a key figure in the AI boom
- Cybersecurity pros say everyone panicking about AI-powered hacks is wrong
- AI’s new business model: Break the internet, then sell the fix
- This former Facebook employee wants to show AI in all its glory—and all its flaws
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