ANTHROPIC HIRES LONDON LAW FIRM FOR IPO AS TWO AI COMPANIES ABSORB 43 PERCENT OF ALL GLOBAL STARTUP FUNDING Anthropic has hired Freshfields, the UK law firm that recently advised Google’s $32 billion acquisition of Wiz and ServiceNow’s $4.5 billion Armis deal, as its IPO adviser. The hire signals that Anthropic’s path to the public markets is now a formal legal process rather than a speculative ambition. The timing is significant: Anthropic’s annualized revenue run rate hit $47 billion in May, surpassing OpenAI’s self-reported $25 to $33 billion range, making it the better-positioned of the two companies heading into a public listing. The backdrop to this IPO story is a set of numbers that reveal how completely two companies have come to dominate global startup capital. Crunchbase’s first-half 2026 report found that global venture capital hit a record $510 billion in the first six months of the year. OpenAI and Anthropic together absorbed $217 billion of that total, which amounts to 43 percent of all startup funding raised by every company on the planet during that period. To understand what that concentration means, consider Menlo Ventures. The firm closed a $3 billion fund, its largest ever, with an Anthropic stake inside it reportedly worth nearly $14 billion. That is not a diversified portfolio outcome. That is one bet paying off at a scale that rewrites the economics of venture capital. The Anthropic and OpenAI IPOs will determine how that capital, and the assumptions behind it, get tested when public markets finally get a look at the numbers. Keywords: Anthropic IPO Freshfields, global VC record 2026, Anthropic OpenAI venture capital, AI startup funding H1