Anthropic’s CFO Krishna Rao is steering one of the most anticipated IPOs ever

The maker of Claude AI confidentially submitted a draft registration statement on Form S-1 to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for a proposed public listing. For Rao, who joined Anthropic in May 2024 after holding CFO roles at Fanatics Commerce and Cedar, the filing marks a major milestone in what has been a rapid rise at one of AI’s most valuable companies.

The move gives Anthropic, led by CEO Dario Amodei, the option to go public after the SEC completes its review, though the proposed initial public offering (IPO) will depend on market conditions and other factors. “The number of shares to be offered, and the price have not yet been set,” the company said in Monday’s announcement.

Wedbush Securities analysts wrote in a Monday industry note that the move “represents a major step for Anthropic to get ahead of OpenAI as Altman & Co. get ready to go through their own confidential filing.” Anthropic and OpenAI are both laying the groundwork for IPOs that could come as soon as late 2026.

On May 28, Anthropic announced it raised $65 billion in Series H funding at a $965 billion post-money valuation, led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, and Sequoia Capital, eclipsing competitor OpenAI’s value for the first time.

“This Series H financing also includes many of the world’s most prominent investors, as well as strategic infrastructure partners and hyperscalers,” Rao wrote in a LinkedIn post last week. The investment reflects the continued rapid growth in demand for Claude across enterprises and the people who use it for their everyday work, he said.

“We will utilize this capital to advance our safety and interpretability research, continue to expand our compute footprint, and scale the products and partnerships our customers rely on,” he noted.

Rao, who earned a degree in economics from Harvard and a law degree from Yale, didn’t take a traditional path to the CFO seat. But he did gain the operational and strategic experience that companies are increasingly seeking in finance chiefs.

Before his CFO roles, Rao led corporate and operations FP&A at Airbnb and later served as global head of corporate and business development, where he helped raise more than $10 billion in equity and debt capital, including the company’s IPO and private financings. Earlier in his career, he worked as a private equity investor at Blackstone.
 
FP&A is also increasingly becoming a career stop on the path to CFO because it builds the strategic business partnering skills boards now want. (Another example is Apple CFO Kevan Parekh, who came up through FP&A and corporate planning before becoming finance chief in January 2025.)

“Investors will be eagerly awaiting more details from Anthropic’s S-1 over the coming weeks,” according to Wedbush.

For Rao, the filing marks the beginning of what could be his most consequential act yet as a finance chief.

Sheryl Estrada
sheryl.estrada@fortune.com

Leaderboard

Rob Livingston was appointed CFO of Nubank, a digital banking platform, effective July 13. He succeeds Guilherme Lago, who is transitioning to the role of special advisor, after five years as CFO. Lago will support the transition through Aug. 31. Livingston brings more than 30 years of experience. He joins Nubank from spending 12 years at Visa, where he recently served as CFO for North America. He also led corporate finance and investor relations for Visa, Inc., served as CFO for Visa Europe and board member of Visa Europe Limited. Before Visa, Livingston spent 18 years at Capital One.

Nate Olmstead was appointed CFO of The Trade Desk (Nasdaq: TTD), a global advertising technology company, effective July 9. Olmstead joins from Penguin Solutions, an AI infrastructure and technology solutions company, where he was SVP and CFO. Before that, he served as CFO of Logitech International S.A., a multinational company. He also held a number of financial leadership roles during his 16 years at Hewlett Packard Company and Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

Big Deal

Identity fraud has reached a new threshold of sophistication and the banking sector is among the most exposed. AU10TIX’s Q1 2026 Global Identity Fraud Benchmark Report, based on more than 9 million identity verification transactions, found that AI-generated fraud surpassed physical document forgery for the first time on record with nearly 1 in 11 verification attempts showing indicators of AI involvement. 

Banking recorded a forgery rate of 11.69%, nearly 60% above the network average. The report also identified three active fraud rings operating simultaneously across competing organizations, with one coordinated campaign peaking at 1.3 million fraud events in a single day. The firm calls it “infrastructure-level risk”— fraud that is no longer a series of isolated incidents but a coordinated, scalable system that individual institutions cannot fully see on their own, underscoring the growing compliance and operational burden on financial services firms.

Going deeper

Overheard

“There was a little bit of fearmongering from reading about the fact that there’s going to be a collapse of jobs. I think there will be more jobs.”

—Cognizant CEO Ravi Kumar S. said at Fortune’s COO Summit in Scottsdale, Arizona on Monday regarding predictions that entry-level white-collar jobs are headed for extinction in the age of AI. The company hired 20,000 entry-level college graduates last year alone—and expects that number to grow in 2026.