Lifting Foreign Restrictions: A Net Positive for Anthropic
The removal of restrictions on Anthropic's advanced Mythos and Fable models — including on the foreign stage — is a clear net positive for the company. Anthropic wants its users to have access to these advanced models, and international access is not merely a convenience but a strategic necessity. A company hoping to justify an initial public offering at a trillion-dollar valuation cannot rely on U.S.-based customers alone; it needs a broad international customer base at its disposal to support that kind of valuation. Importantly, the restrictions were lifted alongside newly added safeguards, which makes the development an even cleaner win for the company.
How significant is the lifting of these restrictions, and does it affect the timing of the IPO?
Having the restrictions lifted is a definite positive, and it strengthens Anthropic's position by expanding its potential foreign user base. However, the exact timing of Anthropic's public offering remains unknown. A number of reports have suggested the company might be targeting late 2026. By contrast, there has been reporting that its competitor OpenAI has pushed its own IPO back, most likely to 2027. So while the direction is favorable, the precise timing is still to be determined.
What Determines IPO Timing
What will ultimately determine when and how these companies come to market?
The central factor driving the decision to go public is how each company feels about the underlying market conditions themselves. OpenAI appears to be targeting 2027 because it judges those conditions may be more favorable at that point. Waiting also gives OpenAI additional runway to build up the fundamentals that would justify investment — whether by acquiring more users, demonstrating more growth in ad generation through the advertising business it is trying to build out, or highlighting more commercial deals.
AI is very much at the front of mind across the industry, and this shows up even in companies not primarily identified as AI firms. SpaceX, though fundamentally a space company launching rockets, is also active in AI. It struck a $60 billion infrastructure deal with Cursor to gain access to that company's coding tools and computing resources. On the other side of the ledger, SpaceX reached a deal with Reflection AI that lets Reflection use the Colossus data center in Memphis. These arrangements underscore how deeply AI now factors into corporate strategy.
Ultimately, decisions about timing come down to how these companies read the future: what they believe lies ahead, and how they intend to keep acquiring more international users. Those calculations will largely drive their decisions about when to go public.
The Competitive Landscape Is Broader Than Two Names
Is generative AI a two-horse race, or are investors underappreciating a broader competitive landscape?
The competitive landscape is considerably broader than just the two dominant names. To be clear, OpenAI and Anthropic are performing exceptionally well in their own right, doing a phenomenal job of increasing their revenue run rates year over year — a genuinely incredible feat. But they are also burning a great deal of capital, and the competitive pressure from open-source models cannot be ignored.
Reflection AI is one such open-source model, and its final product has yet to be seen. On the international stage, it is impossible to ignore Chinese open-source models such as DeepSeek, which are also competing against the leading American firms. If OpenAI and Anthropic truly want to hold their edge, they must respect that additional competition is arriving through the open-source community. Anthropic's leadership has itself sought to warn about the trajectory of open-source AI. That technology will continue to develop, which means the leading companies have to stay cognizant of it and compete against it rather than dismiss it.
The Profitability Overhang
At what point is revenue growth no longer enough, and when will investors demand evidence of sustained profitability?
Anthropic's expected revenue run rate has exploded over the past year, but revenue growth alone will not satisfy investors indefinitely. Profitability is unlikely to arrive before the IPO, and the timeline for it stretches well beyond. Even for OpenAI, the potential to reach profitability is not expected to arrive until 2030 — still a long way off. In the meantime, both Anthropic and OpenAI are burning through billions of dollars.
Despite strong revenue growth, this dynamic does not change the fundamental challenge: these companies need to figure out how to bring their costs under control while simultaneously expanding their user bases and finding new ways to generate revenue. It is critical that they not take what they have for granted. They must continue investing in their products, but they must also solve the cost problem. Sustained profitability, in other words, is the key overhang looming over the entire story.
First Mover Versus Second Mover
Is there a benefit to coming to market first, or an advantage in going second?
An argument can be made either way. Being first carries the classic first-mover advantage, along with a great deal of excitement and energy around the offering. Anthropic, in its earlier valuations, was already at or near a trillion-dollar valuation, so if it hits that mark there would be considerable added energy around its debut. This pattern was already visible with the SpaceX offering, which moved from around a trillion dollars to over $2 trillion in a short period of time.
At the same time, there is a real case for going second. If the performance numbers that come to light as investors gain more insight do not measure up to expectations for whichever company debuts first, then the second mover — whether that turns out to be OpenAI or Anthropic — may actually find a lane to grow considerably better as a result. Watching the first entrant and learning from how the market receives it can be its own form of advantage.
Outlook
The concrete timing of these offerings remains unsettled, and this will be an ongoing conversation as more definitive signals emerge. What is clear is that the lifting of Anthropic's foreign restrictions strengthens its international position and supports its path toward a very large valuation, while the unresolved question of sustained profitability — set against enormous capital burn and intensifying open-source competition — remains the defining uncertainty hanging over both leading AI companies.
