Stay up to date on daily news with NPR's Up First newsletter sent every weekday morning.

Anthropic, maker of Claude, one of the most popular artificial intelligence models on the market, has started the ball rolling on an initial public offering.

The company announced on Monday that it has "confidentially submitted" a draft registration statement known as a Form S-1 with the Securities and Exchange Commission for its proposed IPO.

"This gives us the option to go public after the SEC completes its review," it said in an announcement. "The proposed initial public offering will depend on market conditions and other factors."

Anthropic said the number of shares and price have not yet been set.

The filing sets the stage for what is shaping up to be a trio of potential mega-listings by tech companies: Elon Musk's SpaceX, involved in rocketry and AI, filed financial information in late May for an IPO. And OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, is also widely reported to be planning a listing.

"We believe this represents an opening of the floodgates for the IPO market, which has been relatively dormant for a few years, with these three major conglomerates set to go public later this year, but this has turned into a race to reach public markets over the coming months," analysts at Wedbush Securities wrote in a note after Anthropic's announcement.

Anthropic's is already valued at almost $1 trillion

The filing comes a week after Anthropic announced that its valuation had reached $965 billion after its latest round of fundraising. That makes it bigger than OpenAI, which in March said it was worth $852 billion after a recent funding round.

It also comes at a time of great hype and anxiety over AI. Shares in chip stocks and other companies involved in the AI supply chain have been soaring, as companies like Anthropic and OpenAI have been investing heavily in data centers.

But recent polls show that Americans are wary of AI's impact on daily life.

Tagged: tech companies

AI giant Anthropic prepares to sell stock to the public, files preliminary IPO paperwork