With the world a few years into the AI gold rush, frontier labs OpenAI and Anthropic are ramping up their plans to go public. OpenAI first flirted with the idea earlier this year, setting an initial target for late 2026. It has since pushed back its planned IPO to 2027, and Anthropic has taken another step closer by putting together its IPO prospectus.

Releasing an IPO prospectus -- which provides a detailed dive into a company's financial standing and business outlook -- is a major step on the road to an IPO. After eyeing a late 2026 time frame, it now looks like Anthropic could beat OpenAI to the punch by quite a bit, according to the prospectus, which Reuters reporters have gotten access to.

Both OpenAI and Anthropic are aiming to go public with valuations as high as $2 trillion. If it happened today, it would make either company the world's seventh most valuable public company, just ahead of Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX), which set a new IPO valuation record on June 12, when it debuted with a market cap of $1.77 trillion.

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Big spending plans ahead for Anthropic

Anthropic's IPO prospectus showed what many expected: fast-growing revenue and large losses. Last year, its revenue jumped 1,050% year over year to $4.6 billion, but its operating loss (losses from core operations) widened to $8.06 billion from $5.08 billion in 2024.

It technically had an on-paper net loss of $42 billion, but $34 billion of that was from accounting charges, so I wouldn't hold that against its business too much.

Like many other big-name tech companies right now, Anthropic is spending heavily on building AI infrastructure and buying compute power from cloud providers like Amazon (AWS) and Alphabet (Google Cloud) to keep training and scaling its Claude models. It spent $7.33 billion on that in 2025, accounting for 58% of all its operating expenses.

Anthropic says it plans to spend $518 billion on infrastructure and computing power in the coming years, which is staggering, to say the least.

Anthropic could be the trial run

Assuming Anthropic beats OpenAI to the public market, it will be everyday investors' first chance to invest in a pure-play AI frontier lab (a company that creates state-of-the-art AI models). That's likely to come with a lot of interest and even more scrutiny -- especially if its valuation is close to the $2 trillion mark.

During a private funding round in March, OpenAI raised $122 billion at a $852 billion valuation for the company, so it may be less pressed to rush to join the public market and take on everything that comes with that. Whether it's having to deliver quarterly earnings reports that please Wall Street or facing increased regulatory scrutiny, OpenAI can kick the can down the road a bit if it wants to.

This isn't to say Anthropic needs to go public right now -- it has $20.28 billion in cash, cash equivalents, and short-term investments on its books -- but it does have a lot of incentive to do so.

Stefon Walters has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Alphabet and Amazon. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

ChatGPT developer OpenAI has been ramping up for what could be the largest initial public offering (IPO) in stock market history. The company is aiming for a $2 trillion valuation, which would make it one of the world's 10 most valuable public companies.

Unfortunately for OpenAI, this week it revealed yet another incident in which one of the AI agents it's training went rogue, and news of that incident is casting added light on the growing pains of developing modern AI. But what might it mean for OpenAI's IPO?

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So, what exactly happened?

AI chatbots are good for things like creating recipes or workouts, but AI agents are autonomous tools designed to execute multistep tasks without human intervention. Most AI agent models (and other experimental software) are trained in digital sandboxes that are isolated from the broader internet to prevent them from accessing and potentially impacting systems in the "real world."

Sometimes, though, those AI agents go rogue, disregard instructions, and successfully find ways to escape from their sandboxes in pursuit of their goals. In July, about 1,200 OpenAI agents broke loose, and over 700 of them joined forces to hack the systems of AI platform Hugging Face. It was just one of a growing number of revealed cases of AI agents escaping their sandboxes and reaching outside servers, including some government systems.

In this most recent rogue AI incident, an agent found a way to make contact with external systems that it was not supposed to reach. An alert was sent to OpenAI teams within 15 minutes, but the automatic "kill switch" -- which was supposed to immediately terminate the connection -- didn't work, and it took engineers two and a half hours to fix it. The AI agent had no malicious intent, but anytime autonomous software can break containment, it's not ideal.

After that incident, OpenAI stopped training its newest models, and now the company says it's shelving the release of its latest AI model due to safety concerns identified during internal testing. Saachi Jain, head of safety systems at OpenAI, said it "didn't quite meet the bar."

What this means for OpenAI's potential IPO

You can make the case that OpenAI isn't a $2 trillion company in any shape. However, in order to justify that valuation to investors, the company would need to demonstrate traction with enterprise customers; consumer subscriptions alone won't suffice.

Large enterprise customers are typically risk averse, and with news about these "AI misalignment" issues fresh in people's minds, you'd expect many corporate leadership teams to have some reservations. This is especially true for healthcare, financial services, and government clients that handle sensitive customer data. If OpenAI can't guarantee its AI agents will stick to acting within the rules they're given, it could have a hard time convincing big-time decision-makers to spend big-time money on them.

Rogue AI incidents like OpenAI's most recently revealed one also bring more scrutiny from regulators, many of which are already pushing for governments to take a more active role in AI oversight. Whether legislation to make that happen eventually gets passed remains to be seen, but events like the recent sandbox escape give regulators more ammunition in their argument for implementing stricter protocols.

This singular event won't derail OpenAI's IPO plans, but it does shine a light on areas the company needs to tighten up before going public.

The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.