Wall Street just handed Anthropic $15 billion. The biggest AI IPO ever is now days away

Wall Street just handed Anthropic $15 billion. The biggest AI IPO ever is now days away

If you needed a sign that the AI capital rush is entering a new phase, here it is. Anthropic — the company behind Claude — is on the verge of locking in a $15 billion revolving credit facility with Wall Street's biggest banks, according to Bloomberg. That's six times larger than the $2.5 billion credit line it secured last year, and it clears one of the last financial hurdles before the company files its public IPO paperwork.

The message from the banks is hard to miss: they want in. Badly.

Who's writing the checks

Morgan Stanley is leading the deal, with Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, and Citigroup in prominent roles. Those four names should ring a bell — they're the same banks reportedly leading Anthropic's IPO underwriting syndicate. Barclays and Wells Fargo are also expected to take key positions on the loan, while Bank of America, Deutsche Bank, Royal Bank of Canada, and UBS round out the participant list.

Here's the telling detail: Anthropic originally targeted roughly $10 billion for this facility. Banks pushed so hard to participate that the final size ballooned to $15 billion. The banks are still finalizing their individual commitment amounts, so the exact figure could shift slightly, but the direction is clear — demand far outstripped what Anthropic asked for.

A revolving credit facility is essentially a corporate credit card. Companies draw from it when they need cash and pay interest only on what they use. For a company burning billions on GPU clusters and data centers, having $15 billion of standby liquidity is a serious safety net.

The IPO timeline is getting concrete

This credit deal isn't happening in a vacuum. It's the final prep step before Anthropic goes public.

The company confidentially filed its S-1 with the SEC on June 1, 2026 (UTC-4). Multiple reports now point to the public filing landing shortly after the U.S. Labor Day holiday on September 7, 2026 (UTC-4), with an investor day in mid-September and a possible listing as early as late September or early October.

If that timeline holds, Anthropic could debut on public markets within weeks.

The numbers that make Wall Street salivate

Anthropic's last private round tells you everything about where this is headed. In May 2026, the company raised $65 billion in Series H funding at a $965 billion post-money valuation on May 28, 2026 (UTC-4), led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, and Sequoia. Amazon and Google-related entities also participated.

Since then, the numbers have only grown. Bloomberg data suggests Anthropic's annualized revenue has surged past $65 billion — a staggering figure for a company that was virtually unknown to consumers three years ago.

The IPO targets being floated in the market are even more eye-watering:

Sources: Bloomberg, The Information, Reuters, Anthropic Series H announcement (May 28, 2026)

SpaceX's $86.2 billion IPO in June 2026 currently holds the record for the largest public offering in history. Anthropic is explicitly targeting at least that much — and potentially far more. At a $2 trillion valuation, it would become one of the most valuable companies on Earth on day one.

Why this matters beyond one company

The $15 billion credit facility is more than a financing move. It's a confidence vote from the entire financial establishment at a moment when AI valuations are under real scrutiny.

Consider the context: just this week, OpenAI launched GPT-6 Astra, NVIDIA closed its $12.9 billion acquisition of Hugging Face, and every major AI lab is racing to ship frontier models. The compute costs are staggering — Anthropic alone has committed to potentially hundreds of billions in infrastructure deals, including a major compute purchasing agreement with SpaceX.

Wall Street is essentially saying: we don't just believe these companies are valuable, we're willing to lend them billions against that belief before they've even filed their public financials.

For the broader AI industry, Anthropic's IPO will be the moment of truth. Public markets will finally get to see real revenue numbers, margins, and burn rates — not just press releases and private round valuations. If Anthropic prices well, it could open the floodgates for OpenAI (reportedly targeting a 2027 IPO), xAI, Mistral, and a wave of AI infrastructure companies. If it stumbles, the entire AI funding narrative takes a hit.

What to watch next

• September 7, 2026 (UTC-4) — the public S-1 filing could drop any day after Labor Day
• Mid-September — expected investor day / roadshow kickoff
• Late September – early October — possible first day of trading
• The final size and terms of the $15 billion credit facility

One thing is already clear: the era of AI companies staying private indefinitely is ending. Anthropic is about to test whether public market investors have the same appetite for AI that private investors have shown for the past two years. Given that banks just tripped over themselves to lend $15 billion, the early answer looks like yes.