- Anthropic confidentially filed its IPO prospectus in June and has been meeting prospective investors ahead of a debut widely expected as soon as next month, with a potential valuation around $2 trillion. The company has selected Nasdaq as its listing exchange, confirmed by CNBC after Business Insider first reported the choice. Anthropic was valued at $965 billion earlier this year.
- CEO Dario Amodei published an essay over the weekend urging the industry to slow the pace of model development, proposing third-party evaluators, common safety standards across frontier labs, and coordination between democratic and authoritarian governments where possible. Sam Altman and Elon Musk both voiced support for the proposal.
- The growth numbers underpinning the IPO are steep. Anthropic hit $65 billion in annualized revenue in July, roughly sevenfold higher than a year earlier, and the Financial Times reported Sunday that the company has told some shareholders it expects a second consecutive quarter of operating profit.
- Reaction is split along predictable lines. Menlo Ventures’ Matt Murphy called the growth rate off the charts and sees no reason to delay. D.A. Davidson’s Gil Luria called the safety push “monopolistic behavior” and said it “feels more and more like a ladder pull,” while Gartner’s Arun Chandrasekaran noted stricter standards structurally favor incumbents who can afford the compliance cost.
What Happened?
Amodei’s essay landed as researchers at both Anthropic and OpenAI issued warnings last week about the technology’s catastrophic risk potential, following a resignation over safety concerns. He proposed a three-part plan intended to slow capability growth without, in his framing, sacrificing commercial advantage or the US AI lead. Altman separately told Fortune that now would be an ill-advised moment for OpenAI to go public, reiterating a 2027 target after CFO Sarah Friar told staff the company will be public that year. Altimeter’s Brad Gerstner, an investor in both companies, called researcher warnings “hyperbolic scare tactics hiding behind a political agenda” a day before endorsing more transparency and accountability for AI firms and predicting Anthropic proceeds with its IPO regardless.
Why It Matters?
The tension is real, not just rhetorical. A company raising equity on the promise of exponential model improvement is simultaneously arguing publicly that such improvement should slow — and D.A. Davidson’s Gil Luria makes the sharpest version of the skeptical case: safety standards that are costly to meet advantage the labs that already have the most capital and the most advanced models, which is Anthropic and OpenAI. PitchBook’s Harrison Rolfes raises the more basic public-market question, whether investors want a newly listed company immediately absorbing security and safety costs rather than expanding into the markets it pitched. Public sentiment adds pressure from the other direction: Pew found more than half of Americans now more concerned than excited about AI, up from 37% in 2021, and a CNBC Generation Lab survey found roughly three-quarters of 18-to-34-year-olds don’t trust Amodei to act responsibly, with about 70% saying the same of Altman. Deepwater’s Gene Munster argues the market is underwriting continuous model improvement, so any perceived slowdown reads as a negative regardless of the safety framing.
What’s Next?
The IPO timeline itself is the immediate signal to watch — Class V Group’s Lise Buyer doesn’t expect the extinction-risk debate to delay listing but thinks it could compress valuation. Investor scrutiny is likely to focus on compute commitments: Anthropic has signed multibillion-dollar deals with Nscale, AMD, SpaceX and Google this year, and Plexo Capital’s Lo Toney wants visibility into how spending shifts between frontier training, post-training and inference as any safety controls are added. OpenAI has reportedly asked Congress whether a coordinated industry slowdown would raise antitrust concerns, per Wired, which is worth tracking given both companies are pursuing similar public positioning. Munster’s prediction — that the leapfrog race continues regardless of the rhetoric — is the base case to test against whatever Anthropic does operationally between now and its roadshow.
Source: CNBC
