Anthropic Picks Nasdaq While OpenAI Stays Private: AI's Two Giants Choose Opposite Roads

By Omar aka Crypt0 · Sep 13, 2026

The two companies defining the AI era just told us they plan to fund the future in completely different ways. Anthropic has selected Nasdaq for its potential initial public offering, Business Insider reported on Sunday, citing a person familiar with the company's plans. The same weekend, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told Fortune that OpenAI will stay private this year, choosing to focus on addressing safety related questions around the technology instead of ringing a bell.

That split is worth more attention than most funding headlines. Going public would give Anthropic access to the deepest pool of capital on earth, and it would give everyday investors a direct stake in the upside of advanced AI for the first time. Staying private gives OpenAI room to make long horizon bets on safety research and frontier models while answering only to its own board and investors. Both paths exist because the compute race has become so expensive that the funding model itself is now a strategic weapon.

The timing is telling. This month alone Anthropic has been riding a wave of momentum, its Claude Fable 5.1 and Mythos 5.1 models are cutting agentic costs by up to 45 percent for heavy workloads, and Europe's cybersecurity agency is now stress testing Mythos 5. OpenAI, meanwhile, has just shipped GPT 6 Astra as its first model to cross the internal Critical cybersecurity threshold, a milestone that puts safety engineering at the center of the company's public story. One company is leaning into the spotlight of public markets. The other is leaning into the lab.

Here is the deeper play. An IPO is also a transparency event. Public filings would eventually reveal how much money Anthropic spends on training runs, how its revenue breaks down between API customers and enterprise seats, and what its unit economics look like at scale. For an industry that mostly operates behind closed doors, that kind of disclosure would be a gift to researchers, competitors, and policymakers trying to understand where the technology is actually heading.

OpenAI's path has its own logic. Private capital has already carried the company through the most expensive training runs in history, and partners like Microsoft give it distribution that a ticker symbol cannot. Staying private lets Altman keep safety reviews, like the formal pre release process that Astra went through with the Trump administration, inside the building rather than in an S 1 filing. For now, the company seems to believe that restraint buys more trust than a listing.

The contrast says something encouraging about the maturity of this industry. Five years ago, every ambitious AI lab followed the same playbook: raise a mega round, train a bigger model, repeat. Now the biggest players are diversifying their capital strategies the way grown up industries do, matching their funding structure to their mission. Anthropic wants the accountability and firepower of public markets. OpenAI wants the patience and control of private money. Both are valid ways to pay for intelligence.

What should readers take from this? If Anthropic lists, it becomes the first pure play frontier AI stock, and millions of people will be able to own a piece of the AI buildout rather than just renting it through subscriptions. If OpenAI holds out, it signals that the private markets still have enough appetite to fund frontier safety work at full speed. Either way, the race is accelerating, and the money flowing into it keeps widening the circle of people who get to participate.

Sources

New to crypto? Read the crypto glossary, browse frequent questions, read our story, or explore the story archive.