Money is a story we agree to believe. A dollar buys a dollar's worth because we all act as if it does, and a company is worth whatever the next buyer will pay, not a penny more.

For most of the past century, the biggest stores of that belief were countries and the giant public companies their citizens could actually own a slice of. You could buy Coca-Cola, your local bank, or the carmaker down the highway, and the value sat in plain sight on a stock exchange.

That arrangement is quietly breaking. Some of the most valuable enterprises on Earth are now private, held by venture funds and insiders rather than the public, and ordinary investors stay locked out until the company decides to let them in.

The hottest of them all just took two steps that bring it closer to your brokerage account.

Anthropic, the artificial intelligence (AI) lab behind the Claude chatbot, confidentially filed for an initial public offering (IPO) on June 1.

A day later, it scaled its most powerful model to critical infrastructure across more than 15 countries.

How AI startup Anthropic got bigger than most national economies

Anthropic, founded in 2021 by a group of researchers who left OpenAI, raised $65 billion in a Series H round on May 28.

The deal valued it at about $965 billion and pushed it past OpenAI as the most valuable AI startup in the world, according to CNBC.

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The filing drops Anthropic into a three-way sprint for the public markets. SpaceX is expected to list first, with Anthropic and OpenAI racing to be the second company ever to go public near or above a $1 trillion valuation, Axios reported.

When I ran Anthropic's valuation against the IMF's 2025 GDP table, the AI lab landed around the world's 20th-largest economy, bigger than the yearly output of entire nations.

• Anthropic's roughly $965 billion valuation tops the 2025 gross domestic product (GDP) of Belgium, Sweden, or Argentina, based on IMF figures.

• Only about 21 countries produced more than $1 trillion in goods and services in 2025, according to the IMF.

• Anthropic's revenue run rate reached about $47 billion in May, up from roughly $10 billion a year earlier, CNBC noted.

A valuation is not the same as GDP. One measures what investors will pay for a piece of a company, while the other measures a full year of a country's output. Even so, the comparison captures something real about where wealth is pooling, and how few hands hold it.