Anthropic could seek to raise $100 billion in a blockbuster IPO

Anthropic, a cutting-edge artificial intelligence company, has spent the past year outpacing rivals in the race to dominate the technology. Now he can also surpass those rivals with his upcoming Wall Street blockbuster.

In recent discussions with potential investors, Anthropic’s bankers said the San Francisco company could seek to raise more than $100 billion in its initial public offering, two people with knowledge of the talks said. The offer could also value the company at $2 trillion, said the people, who were not authorized to speak publicly about the confidential talks.

If successful, Anthropic, which was founded just five years ago, would launch its largest public offering to date. It would surpass Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which went public in June at a valuation of $1.77 trillion and raised $85.7 billion. It would also be a big leap forward for Anthropic, which was valued at $900 billion in a private fundraising round earlier this year and went public in June.

Antropic is making an early stage offering to potential investors, a process that includes explaining the state of its business and growth trajectory while evaluating investor interest in its stock.

Its listing would test the market’s appetite for AI shares at a time of political and economic uncertainty. After SpaceX, Anthropic would be the second artificial intelligence lab to produce large language models to go public since the frenzy around the technology began four years ago. OpenAI, maker of the ChatGPT chatbot, is also in talks with investors about a public offering that could come next year.

Anthropic was founded in 2021 by Dario Amodei, the company’s CEO, and others who left OpenAI after a disagreement over the direction of AI development. For years, this start-up was considered a mainstream OpenAI platform.

But Mr Amodei and others have spent years developing AI programs that can generate code, engage in long discussions and automate business processes. After breakthroughs in Claude Code’s coding chatbot program, the company’s revenue skyrocketed.

In May, Anthropic surpassed OpenAI’s valuation to become the world’s most valuable private startup at $900 billion, compared to OpenAI’s $730 billion. Antropic landed at that valuation in view of going public with a much higher valuation, one of the people said.

In its initial presentation to potential investors, Anthropic’s management said it believed its AI models would continue to improve, which would allow the company to continue charging a premium for its services as competitors tried to undercut it on price. Investors have questioned how the firm plans to continue charging high fees and how it will deal with the rise of open-weight models that disclose the calculations that drive their systems, which may be cheaper than Anthropic’s offerings.

Anthropic investors expect the potential market for the company’s services to be in the trillions of dollars and eventually include a wide range of white-collar jobs, people familiar with the discussions said.

As Anthropic moves closer to hitting the public markets, a big part of its pitch to investors is likely to include its consistent revenue growth of more than 10 times the previous year, two investors familiar with the company said. A key question is whether Anthropic can gain access to enough AI computing power — through data centers, chips and power — to meet demand for its services, the people said.

Anthropic is expected to unveil its public offering prospectus in the coming weeks and list its shares in the coming months.

The company shared financial updates with investors ahead of the IPO. Last month, the start-up surpassed $65 billion in annual revenue, or monthly revenue extrapolated to a full year, four people with knowledge of the figures said. That was up from $9 billion in annual revenue at the end of last year.

Antropic generated $11.6 billion in revenue in the second quarter, a person familiar with the figures said.

The Financial Times reported about it formerly about Anthropic’s potential $2 trillion valuation, and Bloomberg reported formerly on his annual income.

(The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in 2023, alleging copyright infringement of news content related to AI systems. Both companies denied the claims.)

Mike Isaac contributed reporting from San Francisco.