Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan, and the race for Anthropic lead left

Somewhere in Goldman Sachs’ and Morgan Stanley’s investment banking divisions, teams of bankers are currently fighting for a single line of text. Being the first name on the cover of Anthropic’s prospectus may appear as a vanity dispute, but this placement – known on Wall Street as lead left – determines who controls the sale of what could be one of the largest share offerings in history, and consequently who collects the largest cut of the fee pool that could run into the billions. 

Anthropic’s initial public offering: the first time this private company will open up its shares to anyone with a brokerage account, as opposed to ownership between a small number of private investors. Since its founding in 2021 by defected OpenAI executives, Anthropic has raised over $130 billion in capital, including $65 billion in their most recent Series H funding in May 2026. This growth signal has helped establish a near-trillion-dollar valuation at $965 billion - up from $380 billion post-Series G - edging past OpenAI's $852 billion. A tight race is therefore established to see which AI lab reaches public markets first, and there is a parallel race to see which bank earns the reputation of the AI industry banker. 

The three banks form the underwriting syndicate: tallying investor orders and interest gathered during the pre-IPO closed-door roadshow, when company executives and bankers pitch institutional investors on how many shares they want and at what price. JPMorgan Chase sits in the underwriting syndicate too, though Bloomberg reporting consistently places it a rung below Goldman and Morgan Stanley in seniority, likely due to ranking lower in tech-IPO league tables. 

The contours of the deal have moved fast. Anthropic filed confidentially with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on 1 June; by mid-July, bankers were already scheduling pre-roadshow meetings with prospective investors - a sign the company is close to a formal filing, with a listing possible as early as October. Whether this is delayed hinges partially on how much push-back the SEC gives Anthropic on the accuracy and completeness of their statements and disclosures. 

What hasn't settled is which bank actually runs each book. Jay Ritter, a University of Florida finance professor who studies IPO structure, has suggested that until the decision is made, big institutional investors are hedging by staying close to both banks at once. As he put it, they "need to spread their bets by gaining favor with both" (Fortune). That's a telling detail: even the largest funds in the world don't know yet which bank will decide their allocation, so they're courting both.

When Goldman priced SpaceX's IPO - where it already holds the lead-left role - at $135 a share in June, the stock closed its first day at $160.95, a 19% jump. Banks deliberately set the share offer price below where they expect the stock to trade once public - partly to guarantee a successful sale, partly because a strong ‘pop’ on day one by supply-demand dynamics generates goodwill and headlines. This means not every investor who wants shares gets them, and that's where lead-left's real power sits: the senior bank decides which funds get filled, and by how much. The lead underwriter will likely leverage this power by negotiating increased trade volumes and commissions in other areas of the investors’ portfolios, maximising their soft-dollar upside. Lead underwriters are also gifted with the opportunity to reward key clients and court new prospective clients. Analysts have estimated that the resulting business from favourable allocation can be worth several times the direct underwriting fee itself. 

Goldman and Morgan Stanley are not just competing to underwrite Anthropic but treating frontier AI labs as a distinct, high-priority client category worth building infrastructure around. Goldman's launch of a private-markets platform in July, designed to get wealthy clients into pre-IPO stakes in companies like SpaceX and Stripe; the wholesale business model these listings are creating relationships with AI-native companies before, during, and after they go public, monetized at every stage. 

There's a structural tension worth sitting with here too. Goldman and Morgan Stanley are each advising two direct competitors - Anthropic and OpenAI - on offerings that will be priced and marketed to the same pool of institutional capital within months of each other. Banks insist on information barriers between deal teams, but the incentive to keep both AI labs happy, and to avoid one listing cannibalizing demand for the other, sits awkwardly alongside each bank's fiduciary duty to get the best possible price for its own client. It's a conflict embedded into being the trusted advisor to an entire, tiny industry at once: an uncomfortable reality. 

The next real signal will be the public S-1 filing (where the gross spread percentage will be revealed for the first time), which shows whether a lead-left decision has been made or whether both banks remain jointly listed, delaying the reckoning further. Until then, both banks have every incentive to keep proving themselves right up until pricing day. Goldman’s largest edge is its previous lead left on SpaceX's IPO, which priced at a $1.77 trillion valuation in June.