Banks Are Prepping a Wall Street Fortune for the AI Firm Trump Tried to Ban

President Trump ordered every federal agency to immediately stop using an AI company he branded a security threat.

That same company just quietly hired Wall Street's biggest banks to prepare investors for a monster stock listing.

Now Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are getting ready to hand Trump's blacklisted AI firm a Wall Street fortune.

Amodei Refused the Pentagon and Got Blacklisted for It

Dario Amodei runs Anthropic, the company behind the Claude chatbot.

Back in February, the Pentagon told Amodei that Claude had to be available for "all lawful use," no exceptions.

Amodei said no.

He refused to let Claude be used for lethal autonomous weapons or mass domestic surveillance without a human in the loop.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth responded by slapping Anthropic with a "supply chain risk" designation, a label historically reserved for foreign adversaries, not American companies.

Trump then posted that he was ordering every federal agency to "IMMEDIATELY CEASE" all use of Anthropic's technology.

Amodei sued.

His company accused the administration of running an "unlawful campaign of retaliation" and dragged the Pentagon into federal court in California and Washington, D.C.

Meanwhile Sam Altman's OpenAI cut its own deal with the Pentagon within hours of Anthropic getting punished.

Fortune has since noted that Altman appears to be winning the fight for Trump's favor while Amodei keeps refusing to play along.

Anthropic was the first frontier AI lab ever cleared for use on classified U.S. government networks.

Getting blacklisted after earning that kind of trust is not a routine business dispute.

Hegseth gave the Pentagon six months to phase Claude out of its systems, even though CBS News reported the military kept using it during the war with Iran.

Anthropic's lawsuit called the whole campaign an attempt to punish the company for protected speech, and warned that the stakes in the case could not be higher.

The fight didn't end with the courtroom either.

In June, Washington imposed export controls on two of Anthropic's newest models after a security researcher found a jailbreak that could expose their more sensitive capabilities.

Those controls were lifted by the end of the month, but the standoff had already made its point.

Now Goldman, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Want In Anyway

None of that has scared off Wall Street.

Bankers at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase are now scheduling meetings between Anthropic executives and prospective investors ahead of a possible October listing on the Nasdaq.

Anthropic confidentially filed its IPO paperwork with the SEC back on June 1.

The company already raised $65 billion in May at a $965 billion valuation, vaulting it past OpenAI for the first time.

That would put a company the sitting president tried to ban from the federal government ahead of his own administration's preferred AI vendor.

It would also make Anthropic the second AI-adjacent company to go public this year after Elon Musk's SpaceX, which debuted in June and is now worth roughly $2.2 trillion.

An Anthropic spokesperson declined to comment on the IPO timeline.

Amodei has publicly shrugged off any doubts about the payoff, telling investors that demand for AI that can reason and write code shows no sign of slowing down.

Anthropic is reportedly running at roughly $47 billion in annualized revenue, built largely on Claude Code, its coding assistant for software engineers.

OpenAI, by contrast, also confidentially filed for an IPO in June, but its nonprofit-linked ownership setup has made its path to Wall Street far messier than Anthropic's.

That mess is exactly why Anthropic could beat Altman to the Nasdaq.

Being first to market matters, since investor appetite for AI stocks could cool the longer these companies wait.

The Irony Wall Street Won't Say Out Loud

Here's what nobody on CNBC wants to say plainly.

Trump didn't hurt Amodei's IPO.

He wrote the pitch deck.

Amodei built his brand on being the cautious one, the safety-first founder who left OpenAI because he thought Altman was moving too fast.

A presidential order branding your company too dangerous for the Pentagon is the best advertising that brand could ever buy.

ESG-obsessed institutional investors don't need Anthropic's marketing team to tell them this is the responsible AI company.

Trump already told them, in all caps, on his own social media platform.

The lawsuit only sealed the deal, turning a defiant founder into a First Amendment martyr on his own terms heading into a roadshow.

Wall Street doesn't punish that story.

It prices it at a premium.

Sources:

• Lucas Nolan, "Anthropic Moves Closer to AI Mega-IPO as Bankers Line Up Investor Meetings," Breitbart, July 19, 2026.
• "Anthropic sues Trump administration after it was designated a supply chain risk," CNBC, March 9, 2026.
• "Anthropic sues Trump administration seeking to undo 'supply chain risk' designation," CBS News, March 2026.
• "Race to IPO: Anthropic vs. OpenAI," Time, June 4, 2026.
• "Top analyst sees 'opening of the floodgates for the IPO market' after Anthropic's filing," Fortune, June 2, 2026.
• "OpenAI Vs Anthropic IPO: How They Compare And What We Know," Forbes, July 2026.
• "One Week Post-IPO, Here's SpaceX's Latest Valuation," Yahoo Finance, June 2026.