Anthropic targets $1.3 trillion valuation in potentially record-breaking IPO

Artificial intelligence giant Anthropic is looking for an approximately $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 San Francisco company is anticipated to make its Wall Street debut this month.

Anthropic could wind up being the biggest initial public offering of stock ever, possibly 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.

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.

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.

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.