Anthropic’s IPO march began with a Claude Code breakthrough

Last fall, Anthropic was playing second fiddle to OpenAI. It had a lower valuation, while OpenAI was still drawing much of the attention as the first mover in the generative AI boom. But the dynamic shifted in late November, when Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.5, which gave the company’s Claude Code coding agent a new brain and helped elevate it to the status of “AI killer app.” Arguably, that was the moment that set Anthropic on its path toward a forthcoming initial public offering