The paperwork is piling up in the banks’ deal rooms. Anthropic is in talks with lenders about a multi-billion-dollar credit facility, according to people familiar with the matter, the kind of arrangement companies arrange before a public listing to reassure investors that they have liquidity beyond their cash on hand. The company, which could debut on U.S. markets as soon as October, has reportedly been valued around $965 billion in recent private financing.
The credit line is one piece of a broader push to convert Anthropic’s technical reputation into a public-company story. The same week, the company and two of the largest private equity firms in the world, Blackstone and Hellman & Friedman, announced a $1.5 billion joint venture called Ode, built to help Fortune 500 companies deploy Anthropic’s Claude models into production systems. The venture will send teams into client environments to handle the integration work that pure software sales rarely cover.
Ode is a bet on where the money in AI is moving. Model makers have learned that selling access to an API is not enough: customers want help wiring the models into their operations, from customer service to internal knowledge bases. Anthropic has been signing integration partners for years, but Ode gives it an equity stake in the services layer, a way to capture revenue that would otherwise flow to consultancies and systems integrators.
The company is also widening its product surface. Anthropic said Claude Cowork, its tool for delegating tasks to AI agents, now works on mobile and on the web, and that 1Password will provide credential access for the tool, letting agents handle password-protected workflows with the same security controls a human would face. The moves are aimed at making Claude feel like an infrastructure product rather than a chatbot, a positioning Anthropic’s executives believe will support a higher valuation.
Not everyone is cheering. Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, which is working on Anthropic’s IPO alongside Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, has publicly warned that Anthropic’s Mythos AI model “is a real problem,” according to remarks reported this week. The comment, aimed at the risks the model poses, was notable both for its source and for its timing, arriving just as the banks prepare to sell the company to investors.
Anthropic’s own marketing has added to the noise. A dark-toned commercial the company released this week, heavy on mood and light on product detail, drew criticism on social media, with some viewers calling it out of step with the company’s safety-focused image. The company’s defenders noted that Anthropic has long tried to brand itself as the responsible AI lab, and that its ads have always skewed toward the cinematic.
The tension between growth and safety is the story investors will hear over and over in the coming months. Anthropic has positioned itself as the AI company that takes risk seriously, with a governance structure designed to keep its founding mission intact. But the demands of a public listing, quarterly revenue targets and competition with OpenAI push in the other direction, and every new product, every partnership and every advertisement will be read through that lens.
The financial architecture being assembled now suggests the company expects the scrutiny. A credit facility, underwritten by the same banks leading the IPO, gives Anthropic a buffer against the kind of cash crunches that have felled faster-spending rivals. The Ode joint venture brings in Blackstone and Hellman & Friedman, investors with deep enterprise networks, as partners rather than mere shareholders. The mobile and web rollout of Cowork widens the addressable market beyond desk workers.
The valuation makes the stakes concrete. At around $965 billion, Anthropic would be one of the largest companies ever to list, and its first earnings calls would be measured against expectations built on growth rates few software companies have sustained. Analysts said the company’s revenue, while growing fast, remains small relative to its valuation, which means the market will be pricing future promise, not current profits.
The competition is watching closely. OpenAI is preparing its own listing, reportedly for 2027, and its bankers include Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup and JPMorgan, an overlapping lineup that has turned the two companies’ preparations into a race for the same investor dollars. The first to list will set the benchmark, and both teams know it.
For now, the sequence is set: credit facility, investor meetings, a public filing, and a listing that could come within weeks of each other. The banks are confident enough in the schedule to be lining up meetings, according to people familiar with the process. Whether the market rewards Anthropic with the reception its backers hope for, or delivers the kind of post-IPO slump that has hit other big listings this year, will become clear before the end of 2026.
Whatever happens, the debate over what Anthropic is, a safety-first research lab that happened to build a business, or a fast-growing software company that happens to publish safety papers, is about to be settled by the one audience that does not care about the branding: the public markets.
