Stacy Boit,

AI giant Anthropic has said it plans to become a public company in the US.

The company behind the popular chatbot Claude said on Monday it had filed confidential paperwork with the US Securities and Exchange Commission in order to make an initial public offering (IPO) this year.

Once public, people will be able to buy and trade shares in the firm on the stock market, though the company said the price and number of shares to be offered “have not yet been set”.

Anthropic’s stock market plans, coming alongside those of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, will likely function as a test of whether investor appetite matches the soaring valuations of AI firms.

Anthropic, founded just five years ago by chief executive Dario Amodei and a handful of other executives, recently raised money from private investors that valued the company at more than $965bn (£717bn ).

While based on an assumption of future growth, that valuation put Anthropic ahead of OpenAI, which most recently was valued by private investors at $852bn.

Chief executive Dario Amodei founded Anthropic after working several years at OpenAI, a company he left after disagreements with its chief executive Sam Altman.

The two firms have since become fierce rivals in the AI world, developing similar technology and fighting for the attention and spending of users and corporate customers.

OpenAI is also reportedly considering going public this year.

Altman told CNBC on Monday while his company did intend to go public, it was in no rush to do so.

“We’ll do it when it makes sense,” Altman said.

Should OpenAI’s listing come to pass, the US capital markets are poised to see an historic level of investmentin just a handful of companies.

SpaceX alone is expected to break stock market records with its target valuation, but the potential value of Anthropic and OpenAI are not far behind.