New York, Nov 10 (AP) Artificial intelligence giant Anthropic is looking for an approximately USD 1.3 trillion valuation when it goes public despite new concerns about the massive amounts debt and 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 USD 70 and USD 78 a share. That would give Anthropic the ability to raise more than USD 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 expected 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 USD 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 US 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.
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 USD 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 US and China and SpaceX, which has an AI business. Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceX’s AI division have all lost more money than they’ve made because of the huge costs of resources in building AI. That has fuelled growing concerns that a bubble has formed in the AI sector.
There was a brutal sell-off on Wall Street last week led by stocks in companies tied to the buildout of AI data centres. Yet shares of AI-related companies have swung wildly for month, particularly after the US Federal Reserve, which has been attempting to cool inflation, hiked interest rates in September for the first time in three years.
Growing anxiety about the cost of borrowing money was heightened Tuesday after a new inflation reading for the US came in hot, raising the odds that the Fed will grow more aggressive in its attempts to cool the economy with larger rate hikes.
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.
(PTI News)
