AI giant Anthropic says it plans to list on US stock market
The company behind the popular chatbot Claude said on Monday it had filed confidential paperwork with the US Securities and Exchange Commission in order to make an initial public offering (IPO) this year.Once public, people will be able to buy and trade shares in the firm on the stock market, though the company said the price and number of shares to be offered "have not yet been set".Anthropic's stock market plans, coming alongside those of Elon Musk's SpaceX, will likely function as a test of whether investor appetite matches the soaring valuations of AI firms.Anthropic, founded just five years ago by chief executive Dario Amodei and a handful of other executives, recently raised money from private investors that valued the company at more than $965bn (£717bn ).While based on an assumption of future growth, that valuation put Anthropic ahead of OpenAI, which most recently was valued by private investors at $852bn.Chief executive Dario Amodei founded Anthropic after working several years at OpenAI, a company he left after disagreements with its chief executive Sam Altman.The two firms have since become fierce rivals in the AI world, developing similar technology and fighting for the attention and spending of users and corporate customers.OpenAI is also reportedly considering going public this year."Neither Anthropic nor OpenAI wants to be the last major AI pure-play to list," Troy Hooper, a leader of equity capital markets at Mergermarket, said. "The first mover has a real chance to define how public markets value generative AI, setting up the yardstick that investors will use to measure everyone else."Should OpenAI's listing come to pass, the US capital markets are poised to see an historic level of investment in just a handful of companies.SpaceX alone is expected to break stock market records with its target valuation, but the potential value of Anthropic and OpenAI are not far behind.After the DoD late last year insisted that Anthropic should accept contractual terms as part of a $200m deal which stated government agencies could use AI tools like Claude for "any lawful use", Amodei made public his concerns.Although Claude was the first modern AI chatbot and model to be deployed on US government networks that were classified, the new contract language suggested to Anthropic the possibility of its AI being used in mass domestic surveillance or on fully-autonomous weapons of war.President Donald Trump denounced the company, and defense secretary Pete Hegseth quickly prohibited any US agency from using Claude.Anthropic subsequently launched legal action against the government. Although there are recent signs from the White House that tensions with Anthropic have cooled, the lawsuit is ongoing.Such acrimony has not scared off other Anthropic customers.The company has told investors that it expects to turn a profit in the first half of this year, as sales of its Claude product and related services have grown significantly.Neither SpaceX nor OpenAI are currently profitable.
Discussion (0)