Tyler Crowe

Anthropic beats OpenAI to this one major milestone.

This is Motley Fool Money.

Tyler Crowe Welcome to Motley Fool Money!

My name is Tyler Crowe.

Today, I'm joined by longtime Fool contributors Matt Frankel and John Quast.

Today, we're going to cover our typical smattering of topics.

We're going to go looking at the buy now, pay later space because of some recent news from Klarna.

We're going to do our typical Thursday stocks on our radar.

But first, we're going to start

with news coming out of Anthropic.

OpenAI's chief competitor, Anthropic, has recently hired lawyers and has been in contact with investment bankers about an IPO that could occur as soon as 2026.

It could end up being the largest IPO ever

or at least in the top five.

Now, there's been a lot of hype for AI-related IPOs this past year in 2025.

We've seen companies like CoreWeave go for almost $100 billion, or at least what they were looking for.

We've seen companies like Fermi, a lot of pre-revenue companies in the AI kind of picks and shovel space going for massive valuations, even though they really haven't done anything yet other than put a plan on paper, and we're getting these very ambitious valuations.

Matt, I have to assume that with this IPO Anthropic's looking at, they're looking for a big payout here, right?

I'm trying to start to think.

Eventually, you see these massive numbers being put up in the private valuation space.

granted the private markets in whether it be venture capital whether it be uh you know kind of insurance companies we're seeing companies like brookfield asset management or these kind of alternative asset managers that are have a lot more money sloshing around to make investments like this eventually the private markets are going to tap out with the amount of money they can give to it so the public market almost seems inevitable for these companies and to your point