- ANTH.PVT
- OPAI.PVT
- SPCX
Artificial intelligence giant Anthropic filed papers Monday for what could be the biggest initial public offering of stock ever even as its top executive warns that advanced AI could pose an existential threat to humanity
The filing sets up the San Francisco company for a Wall Street debut next month, potentially eclipsing the SpaceX initial public offering in June that raised a record $86 billion. An Anthropic IPO would also put the company ahead of OpenAI in going public in what is expected to be a pair of blockbuster stock debuts for the rival AI labs.
An IPO could provide Anthropic with enormous resources to accelerate its expansion. The amount the company ultimately raises remains uncertain, as do its final valuation and offering price, but even at lower estimates, it would turn the five-year-old startup into one of the world’s most valuable companies and potentially boost the wealth of CEO Dario Amodei and his sister and co-founder, Daniela, by billions of dollars.
The 335-page document showed Anthropic’s revenue is growing rapidly, reaching more than $16 billion in the first half of the year — 14 times its revenue from the same period last year. But like many other tech companies going public, the company behind the Claude chatbot has yet to turn a profit.
Despite the losses, Anthropic, valued earlier this year at $965 billion by private investors, is reportedly set to see that value rise to $1.5 trillion or possibly $2 trillion, although its final valuation has not been established. At $1.5 trillion, Anthropic would rank among the world’s most valuable public companies, alongside Tesla.
As for money raised, the offering could bring in as much as $100 billion, according to reports, surpassing the record set by SpaceX.
In a regulatory filing, Anthropic said it will list its stock on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker symbol “ANT.”
A Wall Street debut is planned in a jittery market
In the filing, the company said it could use some of that money on acquiring other businesses and technology as well as investing in infrastructure to grow its business to take on rivals.
Formed in 2021 by former OpenAI leaders, Anthropic is locked in a fight for dominance with that company. The two leaders, Amodei and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, are widely seen as bitter rivals.
But they have plenty of other competitors, including Google, newer startups in the U.S. and China and SpaceX, which has an AI business. Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceX’s AI division have all been losing more money than they make because of the huge costs of resources in building AI, fueling concerns of a bubble.
