Artificial intelligence giant Anthropic is looking for an approximately US$1.3 trillion valuation in an initial public offering despite new questions about the massive amounts of money flowing into the sector. The company behind the Claude chatbot said in a regulatory filing on Tuesday that it will sell 825 million shares priced between $70 and $78 a share. That would give Anthropic the ability to raise more than $61 billion, if the IPO is priced at the midpoint. The initial pricing of a company’s shares is a complex process. If they are priced too high, it can send shares skidding on the first day. If shares are seen as cheap, the company and the banks running the IPO can leave money on the table. The San Francisco company is anticipated to make its Wall Street debut this month. Anthropic could be among the biggest initial public offerings of stock ever, but now seems like it will fall short of eclipsing the record $86 billion raised by SpaceX in its IPO in June. An Anthropic IPO would also put the company ahead of OpenAI in going public, setting the stage for a pair of blockbuster stock debuts by rival AI developers. “For tech and AI, this is the first time a U.S. frontier lab carries a standalone public market price, uncluttered by an ad business or a rocket business,” Dan Ives, partner and senior managing director at Yorkville Ives & Co., wrote in an analyst note. The IPO could give Anthropic enormous resources to accelerate its expansion and potentially add billions of dollars to the fortunes of CEO Dario Amodei and his sister and co-founder, Daniela Amodei. A regulatory filing last month showed that 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 has yet to turn a profit. Formed in 2021 by former OpenAI leaders, Anthropic is locked in a fight for dominance with that company. But both companies 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. There was also a brutal sell-off on Wall Street late last week, led by stocks tied to the buildout of AI data centers. Stock markets around the world felt pressure from continued drops for companies that had benefited from the boom in the artificial-intelligence technology industry. Shares in AI companies have been swinging for months on worries that the construction of further AI data centers may slow because of how expensive it’s become to borrow money. Critics also believe that an AI bubble may be forming. Dario Amodei cautioned in September that the AI industry should slow its fast-moving development to give safety measures time to catch up. Without such a slowdown, Amodei warned AI could be capable of letting loose a swarm of agents that could take over the entire internet within six to 12 months. He offered a plan in a post on his website to increase checks on the industry, noting that Anthropic is already undertaking part of this on its own. As for other steps, though, he said that would require coordination across the industry and with governments around the world, including authoritarian ones. The shares are expected to list on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the “ANT” ticker symbol. Michelle Chapman, The Associated Press
