The two most valuable AI companies on Earth are both planning to go public this year. Both want the Nasdaq. Both want to beat the other to market. But the private markets are already picking a winner, and it is not the one you would expect.

According to TechCrunch, citing Bloomberg data, buyers have told secondary market brokers they have $2 billion in cash ready to deploy into Anthropic shares. Meanwhile, roughly $600 million in OpenAI shares that existing investors are trying to sell have not found takers. Read that again. Anthropic has a line around the block. OpenAI is holding a garage sale nobody showed up for.

Axios reported this week that both companies are eyeing late 2026 listings, with bankers expecting a combined raise exceeding $150 billion. Anthropic alone is targeting a $60 billion IPO as soon as Q4. OpenAI closed a $110 billion private round in February at an $840 billion post-money valuation, but that valuation looks increasingly aspirational given the secondary market signals.

The divergence is striking because twelve months ago, OpenAI was the undisputed front-runner. It had the brand, the consumer product, the enterprise contracts, and the valuation premium. What changed? A lot.

OpenAI burns $14 billion a year. It restructured from a nonprofit in a move that alienated its founding team. Sam Altman faces ongoing personal legal issues. The company has made a series of product bets, killing Sora, bundling everything into a super-app, while investors quietly wonder whether ChatGPT consumer dominance translates into enterprise revenue that justifies an $840 billion price tag.

Anthropic, by contrast, doubled its revenue in two months. Claude subscribers more than doubled this year. The Pentagon fight, counterintuitively, boosted its brand among developers who see Anthropic as the principled alternative. And the company just launched AnthroPAC to make sure Congress sees it that way too.

There is a wild card: SpaceX. The merged SpaceX-xAI entity filed for what could be the largest IPO in history at a $1.75 trillion valuation. If that listing happens first, it could soak up so much investor capital that neither Anthropic nor OpenAI gets the reception they want.

The IPO race is really a credibility race. OpenAI needs public markets to validate its valuation because the private market already has doubts. Anthropic needs public markets to fund its next generation of models because $19 billion in annual revenue still does not cover the cost of competing at the frontier. Whoever goes first sets the benchmark. Whoever goes second gets judged against it.

My bet: Anthropic lists first. The demand is there. The narrative is cleaner. And Dario Amodei is not carrying the baggage Sam Altman is. But both companies going public in the same year would be the biggest capital markets event in tech history. Wall Street is salivating. The rest of us should be paying very close attention.