Anthropic seeks valuation of about $1.3 trillion when it becomes a publicly traded company
The listing comes as people worry that new rules and scandals could weaken the huge amount of money being invested in artificial intelligence.
Anthropic hopes to be worth about $1.3 trillion when it sells shares to the public. Its stock market launch could show whether the AI market is starting to collapse.
The company is preparing to go public at a time when people are worried that new rules following the US midterm elections, along with the effects of the scandal at Nvidia, could make existing concerns worse. These concerns are about the huge amounts of money being poured into artificial intelligence.
The company, which makes the Claude chatbot, said in a government filing on Tuesday that it plans to sell 825 million shares. Each share will cost between $70 and $78. If the shares are priced at the middle of that range, Anthropic could raise more than $61 billion.
The company is based in San Francisco and is expected to start trading on Wall Street this month.
Anthropic could become the biggest company ever to go public through an initial public offering (IPO). It could beat the record set by SpaceX, which raised $86 billion in its IPO in June. Anthropic would also go public before OpenAI, setting up two huge stock market launches by competing AI companies.
The IPO could give Anthropic a huge amount of money to grow its business faster. It could also add billions of dollars to the wealth of its chief executive, Dario Amodei, and his sister and co-founder, Daniela.
A government filing last month showed that Anthropic's revenue is growing quickly. It made more than $16 billion in the first half of the year, 14 times as much as it made during the same period last year. However, like many other technology companies preparing to go public, Anthropic is still losing money.
Anthropic was founded in 2021 by former leaders of OpenAI. The two companies are competing to become leaders in artificial intelligence. But they also face many other rivals, including Google, newer companies in the US and China, and SpaceX, which also has an AI business. Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceX's AI division are all spending more money than they earn. The enormous cost of building AI systems has led to fears that the industry may be in a financial bubble.
In September, Dario Amodei warned that the AI industry should slow down its rapid development. He said safety measures needed more time to catch up. Without a slowdown, he warned, AI could soon be able to create large groups of computer agents that could take control of the entire internet within six to 12 months.
In a post on his website, Amodei suggested a plan to introduce more checks on the AI industry. He said Anthropic was already carrying out some of these checks itself. But he explained that other steps would need companies across the industry to work together with governments around the world, including governments in countries ruled by authoritarian leaders.
Anthropic's shares are expected to trade on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the symbol “ANT”.
Additional reporting by agencies