At a venture-capital conference in San Francisco last autumn, an Anthropic executive was asked a simple question: when would the company go public? The answer — "when the time is right" — told investors almost nothing, yet the room fell silent anyway. That silence said everything about how much money is waiting on the answer. Anthropic, the safety-focused AI laboratory founded in 2021 by former OpenAI researchers Dario and Daniela Amodei, has been valued at roughly $61.

5 billion in its most recent funding round. OpenAI, whose ChatGPT reached 100 million users faster than any consumer application in history, carries a private valuation of around $157 billion. If either company lists its shares at a figure close to those numbers, it would rank among the largest initial public offerings ever staged on an American exchange — a category that includes Saudi Aramco's record $25.6 billion U.

S.-listed float in 2019 and Meta's $16 billion debut in 2012. The appetite for such listings stretches well beyond Wall Street. Institutional investors in Tokyo, London, and Riyadh have already signalled interest, according to people familiar with early conversations.

That global demand reflects a broader conviction that artificial intelligence is not a sector but a structural shift — the kind that rewrites which companies sit at the top of index funds for the next generation.