(AGENCIES)
Anthropic, maker of the chatbot Claude, said Monday that it had filed confidential paperwork with federal regulators in preparation for selling its stock to the public.
The company is expected to be one of three trillion-dollar debuts on the stock market this year, along with Elon Musk’s rocket and AI venture SpaceX and OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT.
SpaceX filed to go public in April and OpenAI is expected to do so soon.
Shares of the three companies could potentially be held by millions of Americans after their stock market debuts. S&P Dow Jones Indices said last month it was considering fast-tracking the process of adding such firms to indexes like the S&P 500 that are tracked by funds popular in retirement accounts like 401ks.
The leading players in the AI industry are racing to go public as they seek to raise ever greater sums of money to pay for the computer chips and data centres they want for their energy-hungry technology. SpaceX disclosed $13 billion in losses since the beginning of 2023, primarily driven by its AI division, xAI.
Anthropic announced its initial public offering plans in a brief statement Monday that said it has not determined how many shares to sell or at what price. The company said last week that it had raised $65 billion from private investors in a deal that brought its total value to $965 billion.
Wedbush Securities, a financial services firm, said in an analysis Monday that Anthropic’s filing "represents an opening of the floodgates for the IPO market, which has been relatively dormant for a few years, with these three major conglomeratesset to go public later this year.”
Anthropic’s filing "starts the clock on what will be the most scrutinised public offering in tech history,” said Harrison Rolfes, an analyst with research firm Pitchbook.
The AI company’s profit margin will be a crucial indicator for the health of the wider AI boom when it releases financial details ahead of selling shares, he said. Hard data on how profitable the expensive business of developing cutting edge AI can be will "either validate or collapse the entire narrative the private markets have been pricing for three years,” he said, as the valuations of Anthropic and OpenAI have soared.
Anthropic’s filing will begin a review by the Securities and Exchange Commission ahead of shares being put up for sale.
Anthropic was founded in 2021 by former OpenAI staff members who were concerned about the safety of the new technology. Its chief executive, Dario Amodei, is known for lengthy musings about AI quickly transforming society, and warnings about the disruption it could bring to the job market and wider economy.
Claude Code, an Anthropic tool for computer programmers, has been widely credited with helping transform the way software code is produced in the tech industry. Investors see the potential for products such as Claude Code to generate huge profits for AI companies, by helping businesses and the public at large automate some work that was once the preserve of middle-class workers.
But to serve more customers and keep advancing their systems’ capabilities, the companies need access to expensive data centres stuffed with powerful computers.
The latest version of SpaceX’s IPO filing gave a glimpse at Anthropic’s hunger for computing power, disclosing that the company had a deal to pay Musk’s firm $1.25 billion monthly for the next three years. Musk later said the agreement was a 180-day lease.