Anthropic has begun the early work required to go public on the stock market.

The Financial Times reports that the generative AI company has picked law firm Wilson Sonsini to help with the initial public offering.

Anthropic has yet to choose its IPO underwriters, and discussions are still early. CEO Dario Amodei has also held informal conversations with the largest investment banks about the IPO.

“It’s fairly standard practice for companies operating at our scale and revenue level to effectively operate as if they are publicly traded companies,” Anthropic said in a statement.

“We haven’t made any decisions about when or even whether to go public, and don’t have any news to share at this time.”

Anthropic is currently in talks for a private funding round that would value the OpenAI competitor at $300-350 billion.

The round will include last month's pledge from Nvidia to invest $10bn, and Microsoft's promise to put in $5bn. Google and AWS are both Anthropic investors.

Anthropic currently uses Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud, signing an October deal with the latter company covering more than 1GW of compute. As part of the Microsoft deal, Anthropic plans to purchase $30 billion of Microsoft Azure compute capacity over an undisclosed timeline.

The Claude company separately announced a $50bn data center investment at Fluidstack facilities – although they are the same sites Google operates out of, so it may be the same deal.