This article first appeared in The Edge Malaysia Weekly on May 11, 2026 - May 17, 2026

GET ready for another humongous initial public offering (IPO). The US$2 trillion (RM7.8 trillion) listing in late June of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which controls satellite broadband giant StarLink that has nearly 11,000 satellites orbiting the earth, will be followed by another IPO at least half as big four months later. Artificial intelligence (AI) large language model developer Anthropic PBC, a public benefit corporation or a for-profit entity that bal­ances profit-making with a positive impact on society, employees, the community and the environment, is seeking to list in late October to raise at least US$60 billion at a valuation of over US$1 trillion. Rival ChatGPT creator OpenAI, which was aiming for a year-end IPO, might now put off its listing until next year. 

Anthropic is best known as the developer of Claude, an AI assistant that specialises in reasoning, coding, analysing and summarising long-form content. In recent months, it has begun disrupting an array of industries, from software to financial services. “Anthropic is the leader in enterprise AI, a position it has cultivated through focus on commercial applications, particularly code development, safety/responsibility, and distribution across inference providers and developer platforms,” Citigroup global head of technology research Heath Terry noted in a recent report. “Sustaining that lead will depend on maintaining technological and product strength while navigating challenges from increasingly enterprise-focused competitors, capacity constraints and pricing for both compute and models,” he said. 

This week, Anthropic began a Series H funding round to raise another US$50 billion at a whopping US$900 billion valuation. That’s a tad higher than ­OpenAI’s post-money valuation of US$852 billion following its US$122 billion funding round at the end of March. This month’s H round will be Anthropic’s second since mid-February when it raised US$30 billion in its Series G round at a US$380 billion valuation. That’s not counting US$65 billion in funding commitments Claude’s developer has secured from its two top shareholders — search giant Google and e-commerce pioneer Amazon.com — recently. In late April, Google committed to investing up to US$40 billion in Anthropic, including an initial US$10 billion in cash to immediately boost computing capacity, and US$30 billion linked to future performance targets. Last week, Amazon committed an additional US$5 billion immediately, and up to US$25 billion in total in the future tied to commercial milestones. Amazon also uses Anthropic’s models to power AWS Bedrock, its generative AI cloud platform. 

Google now owns 14% of Anthropic compared with Amazon’s 7.8% even though Amazon has injected more cash than Google. Because Google was one of Anthropic’s earliest backers, its cash earned it a far bigger stake. Another early investor was Sam Bankman-Fried of the now defunct crypto group FTX, which invested US$500 million for an 8% stake at a US$2.5 billion valuation, just before it collapsed with over US$11.2 billion in debt. FTX eventually recovered over US$16 billion and its creditors were paid in full. As part of its bankruptcy, FTX was forced to sell its Anthropic shares in tranches for over US$1.4 billion in total. At the US$900 billion valuation that Anthropic is seeking in its current funding round, that 8% stake would be worth around US$72 billion or a 144-fold return.  

San Francisco-based Anthropic was founded in 2021 by seven OpenAI executives including Dario Amodei and his younger sister Daniela Amodei, who split from the Sam Altman-led firm mainly due to disagreements over the company’s direction, specifically a shift towards prioritising commercialisation over AI safety. The seven founders collectively govern Anthropic, with Amodei as the CEO. They felt that OpenAI was not sufficiently committed to safety and wanted to build a company where it would be the primary focus. Anthropic pioneered “constitutional AI”, a technique for training AI to follow principles and self-critique. The firm derives its name from the word “anthropic”, which relates to human existence — fitting for an entity whose entire mission revolves around making AI work safely alongside humanity. 

At OpenAI, Amodei had relentlessly battled for a more cautious approach to developing and releasing AI models, fearing that the rapid, ­profit-driven business that his then boss Altman was building could lead to catastrophic risks. He argued for holding back releases to ensure safety, which clashed with the faster, more aggressive commercial approach that Altman was pushing at the time. OpenAI, which was initially a non-profit, was founded and funded by Musk. The CEO of the pioneering electric vehicle maker Tesla now has his own AI firm xAI, which purchased X, formerly Twitter, and earlier this year merged with his rocket firm SpaceX. Musk is now battling Altman in court, where he has alleged that Altman “stole” the OpenAI charity that he had founded. 

OpenAI, xAI, Anthropic and Google have the four advanced, large-scale foundational AI models trained on massive datasets to excel in reasoning, coding and multimodal tasks — text, image, audio and video. Frontier AI models are evolving rapidly and pose both significant security risks and transformative opportunities. OpenAI was the first out of the gate with its ChatGPT chatbot in late November 2022. ChatGPT became the fastest adopted consumer technology in history with 100 million monthly active users in just two months. In comparison, Instagram took 2½ years to reach 100 million users, TikTok achieved the same in nine months while the internet took over a decade to do so.  

The total addressable market for developing AI models is currently estimated to be around US$4.2 trillion. Citigroup expects large, fast growing firms like Anthropic, OpenAI and Gemini creator Google to dominate AI model development, though it notes that the near term will be defined by compute capacity constraints, capital requirements, pace of enterprise adoption and fierce competition among AI labs, hyperscalers and open-source providers.

How are the big four frontier AI models different from each other? 

OpenAI’s GPT is best known for its general tasks, image generation (DAL-E), plug-ins and coding. Its strengths include its massive ecosystem, its GPT store akin to smartphone app stores, and voice mode. Its weaknesses include enterprise privacy concerns and the fact that its responses can be very verbose. Gemini has deep integration with the Google ecosystem — Gmail, Docs, Google Drive, Android and Search. It also has image/video understanding. Claude, meanwhile, has a strong focus on enterprise and is best known for its nuanced and careful tone, and strong reasoning. Claude prioritises API, or application programming interface, access, long-context document processing, and strict safety/privacy controls that appeal to companies.

Until last year, OpenAI was far and away the leader among AI model developers. Then Gemini began catching up. Now Anthropic is leading, particularly in the main revenue generating business-to-business segment. According to Similarweb data for April 2026 released on May 5, ChatGPT topped global daily average web visits last month at 183 million (up 7% year on year but down 1% month on month), Gemini was at 92 million (up an annualised 572% and up 9% over the past month), and Claude was at 27 million (up an annualised 745% and up 3% over the previous month). Claude clearly has momentum. Its mobile app average daily active users surged 44% from 16 million in March to 23 million in April, while Gemini grew roughly 19% over the same period. According to Counterpoint Research’s 1Q2026 data, Anthropic captured 31.4% of the global large language model revenue share, overtaking OpenAI’s 29%. While ChatGPT continues to dominate raw web traffic by a wide margin, the gap is narrowing fast — particularly for Claude and Gemini on a year-on-year basis.

Yet the real difference is in revenues. In April, OpenAI’s GPT had an annual run rate of US$24 billion. It recently missed its 1Q2026 revenue targets. Open AI expects to spend over US$125 billion a year on compute by 2030. Although it has begun to take its enterprise business more seriously, revenue mix still leans fairly heavily towards consumer (ChatGPT Plus/Pro subscribers). Claude, on the other hand, due to its focus on businesses and enterprises, had an annual revenue run rate of US$30 billion in April. Anthropic’s share of US enterprise AI spending climbed to 40% in the January-March quarter, while OpenAI’s fell from 50% to 27% over the same period. 

Here’s how Anthropic’s US$30 billion annual run rate compares with software-as-a-service or SaaS players: Microsoft took 20 years to reach the US$30 billion level of revenue while Salesforce took 15 years. For Anthropic, 80% of revenue comes from enterprises. That includes over 1,000 business customers spending at least US$1 million a year or more on Claude. The company projects positive free cash flow by 2027. Alphabet, which owns Google, does not yet disclose revenue numbers or profitability for Gemini.

In late January, Anthropic released 11 plug-ins for the Claude Cowork platform, triggering a massive sell-off in software stocks dubbed the “SaaSpocalypse”. The release of these tools, designed to automate complex, multi-step tasks in the areas of legal, sales and marketing, caused up to US$830 billion in market value to evaporate from software companies in the following week. In early February, Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.6 and Claude Code, accelerating the shift towards “vibe coding” and agentic workflows that threatened traditional per-seat SaaS models.  

In early April, Claude Mythos, an advanced, unreleased “frontier” AI model developed by Anthropic, disrupted the cybersecurity landscape by demonstrating the ability to autonomously identify, analyse and exploit software vulnerabilities at a speed and depth far exceeding human capabilities. Unlike other models that assist with coding tasks, Mythos can autonomously scan vast, complex codebases and create full working exploits for bugs without human guidance. Due to its huge offensive potential, Anthropic restricted access to the model, choosing to release it only through “Project Glasswing” — a controlled initiative with major technology firms designed to harden systems rather than expose them to attack.

In early May, at an event in New York attended by Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan, Anthropic launched 10 AI agents targeting Wall Street banks and insurers. The tools can build investment bankers’ pitchbooks, draft commercial banks’ credit memos, screen private bankers’ Know Your Client files and has a variety of auditing functions. AI agents assist human analysts in real time, or through Claude Managed Agents, a hosted model in which Anthropic provides the underlying production infrastructure for more autonomous operation. Each template is designed to be customised around a bank or insurance firm’s internal standards, including how it structures models, manages risk and routes decisions for approval. Claude agents cover research and client coverage — including a meeting preparer, earnings reviewer and financial model builder — as well as credit, risk and compliance work through a market researcher, and finance and operations tasks through a valuation reviewer, general ledger reconciler and statement auditor. 

On May 4, Anthropic announced it had signed a US$1.5 billion joint venture with private equity firms Blackstone and Hellman & Friedman, as well as investment bank Goldman Sachs, to help bring Claude into the day-to-day operations of mid-market companies.  

This past week, Anthropic also reached a deal to tap the computing resources of SpaceX. It will use the full computing power of SpaceX’s Colossus 1 facility in Memphis, Tennessee, which houses more than 220,000 Nvidia processors. The deal, which will give the Claude chatbot maker 300mw of new capacity within a month, marks a détente with Musk who once called Anthropic “misanthropic” and “evil” and claimed the company “hates western civilisation”. Now Musk says he made the decision to lease the computing power after spending time with Anthropic’s leaders. Anthropic’s work to ensure Claude is “good for humanity” impressed Musk, and added that “no one set off my evil detector”. A close partnership between two trillion dollar firms seeking imminent listing could be music to the ears of investors.

Assif Shameen is a technology and business writer based in North America

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