Anthropic is making serious moves to become a more vertically integrated AI firm and possible investor favorite. According to a report from Financial Times, the company has begun early preparations for an initial public offering, while this week also announcing its first-ever acquisition: the JavaScript tooling company Bun.
The IPO discussions are still preliminary, but Anthropic has reportedly brought on Palo Alto-based law firm Wilson Sonsini to help with planning, and CEO Dario Amodei’s conversations with investment banks are in the exploratory stage. Even at this early phase, these developments suggest Anthropic could be positioning itself for a public market debut as soon as 2026, according to the report.
An IPO could value Anthropic at $300 billion. The company has raised billions in private investment over the last two years, with the latest $13 billion Series F round completed in September with a post-money valuation of $183 billion. Anthropic is backed by Amazon, Google, Salesforce, and others, and an IPO would give it another path to secure capital as the AI infrastructure race continues on.
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On Tuesday, Anthropic announced its acquisition of Bun, a high-performance JavaScript runtime and toolkit built by founder Jarred Sumner. Anthropic says Bun is dramatically faster than its competition and has become essential infrastructure for AI-led software engineering. The 2021 company is known for its speed and for unifying multiple developer functions into a single system, including runtime, package manager, bundler, and test runner. Anthropic plans to incorporate Bun into the foundation of its coding products, particularly Claude Code, which the company says has reached a $1 billion annualized run rate.
Claude Code became generally available this past May, evolving from an internal engineering project into a tool used by top companies across multiple industries.
“Bun has been key in helping scale its infrastructure throughout that evolution. We’ve been a close partner of Bun for many months. Our collaboration has been central to the rapid execution of the Claude Code team, and it directly drove the recent launch of Claude Code’s native installer,” Anthropic said in a blog post.
Anthropic frames the deal as an investment in developer experience and long-term stability. The company said Bun will remain open source under the MIT license, and its team will continue to lead development. The acquisition will ostensibly give Anthropic more control over the underlying software environment its coding models depend on, reducing friction for developers and potentially allowing more flexibility and optimization between Claude Code and the tools used to run it.
The IPO planning and Bun acquisition highlight a shift in Anthropic’s ambitions. The company is still known for its model research and its emphasis on safety frameworks like Constitutional AI, but its recent momentum has come from its commercial products. Claude Sonnet and Claude Code have pushed Anthropic more directly into the enterprise and developer markets, where the major players are vying to build complete AI software stacks.
Bun adds an infrastructure component to that strategy. Most AI companies rely on third-party runtimes and build tools, but Anthropic’s acquisition suggests a desire to control more of the pipeline between its models and the applications built on top of them. If the company moves toward public markets, that kind of vertical integration may become an important part of the value story it uses to persuade investors.
In the larger AI industry, Anthropic’s latest developments reflect a moment of differentiation. As language models reach comparable performance on many benchmarks, companies are turning to full-stack capabilities like developer tools, hosting environments, and agent frameworks to stay competitive. An IPO would expose Anthropic to more scrutiny around revenue and profitability at a time when the cost of training and serving large models remains high.
For now, the company seems confident. A public listing would be one of the sector’s most closely watched market debuts, while the Bun deal shows Anthropic is stepping into the role of an integrated software platform, not just a model provider. We’ll be watching how this strategy plays out.
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