Claude maker Anthropic seeks $1.3T public valuation

Anthropic filed for a public offering on Tuesday, seeking a valuation of approximately $1.3 trillion. The company behind the Claude chatbot will sell 825 million shares priced between $70 and $78. If priced at the midpoint, the deal would raise more than $61 billion for the San Francisco firm. This figure places the offering below the record $86 billion raised by SpaceX in June.

The company is expected to debut on the Nasdaq Global Select Market this month. The listing will use the ticker symbol ANT. Dan Ives, partner and senior managing director at Yorkville Ives & Co., wrote in an analyst note that this is the first time a U.S. frontier lab carries a standalone public market price. He noted the valuation is uncluttered by an ad business or a rocket business.

Anthropic was formed in 2021 by former leaders from OpenAI. The two firms are locked in a competition for dominance in the artificial intelligence sector. They face pressure from Google, new startups in the U.S. and China, and SpaceX, which operates its own AI division. All three entities are currently spending more than they earn due to high resource costs for building AI.

A regulatory filing released last month showed rapid revenue growth for Anthropic. The company reached more than $16 billion in revenue during the first half of the year. This amount was 14 times higher than the revenue recorded in the same period last year. Despite this growth, the company has yet to turn a profit, a common trend among tech firms going public.

Wall Street experienced a sharp sell-off late last week. The drop was led by stocks tied to the construction of AI data centers. Global markets felt pressure from continued declines in companies benefiting from the AI boom. Shares in AI firms have swung for months amid worries that expensive borrowing costs may slow data center construction. Critics have raised concerns about the formation of an AI bubble.

Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, cautioned in September that the industry should slow its development. He advised a pause to allow safety measures to catch up. Without such a slowdown, Amodei warned that AI could deploy a swarm of agents to take over the internet within six to 12 months. He posted a plan on his website to increase checks on the industry. He stated that some steps require coordination across the sector and with governments worldwide.

The offering may add billions of dollars to the fortunes of Dario Amodei and his sister, Daniela Amodei. Daniela is a co-founder of the company. The new capital could provide resources to accelerate the firm's expansion. The process of pricing shares is complex, as high prices can cause shares to skid on the first day, while low prices leave money on the table for the banks running the IPO.

The filing indicates that Anthropic aims to be one of the largest stock debuts in history. It will precede a similar move by OpenAI. This sets the stage for rival AI developers to enter the public market in succession. The company anticipates listing its shares on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ANT symbol this month.