Anthropic, the high-flying artificial intelligence company, has spent the past year surpassing rivals in the race to dominate the technology. Now it may also surpass those rivals with its coming blockbuster debut on Wall Street.
In recent discussions with potential investors, Anthropic’s bankers said the San Francisco company could seek to raise more than $100 billion in its initial public offering, two people with knowledge of the conversations said. The offering could also value the company at $2 trillion, said the people, who were not authorized to speak publicly about confidential conversations.
If successful, Anthropic, which was founded just five years ago, would issue the largest-ever public offering. It would exceed Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which went public in June at a value of $1.77 trillion and raised $85.7 billion. It would also be a major leap forward for Anthropic, which was valued at $900 billion in a private fund-raising round this year and filed in June to go public.
Anthropic has been making an early pitch to potential investors, a process that involves explaining the health of its business and its growth trajectory while assessing investor appetite for its stock.
Its listing would test the market’s desire for A.I. stocks at a moment of political and economic uncertainty. After SpaceX, Anthropic would be the second A.I. lab that makes large language models to go public since the frenzy over the technology kicked off four years ago. OpenAI, the maker of the ChatGPT chatbot, is also in talks with investors to go public in an offering that may come next year.
Anthropic was established in 2021 by Dario Amodei, the company’s chief executive, and others who had left OpenAI after a disagreement over the direction of A.I. development. For years, the start-up was seen as an also-ran to OpenAI.
But Mr. Amodei and others spent years developing A.I. programs that can generate code, engage in long discussions and automate business processes. After breakthroughs in its coding chatbot program, Claude Code, the company’s revenue surged.
In May, Anthropic surpassed OpenAI’s valuation to become the world’s most valuable privately held start-up at $900 billion, compared with OpenAI’s $730 billion. Anthropic landed on that valuation with an eye toward going public at a far higher valuation, one of the people said.
In their early pitch to potential investors, Anthropic’s executives said they believed that its A.I. models would continue to improve, which would enable the company to keep charging a premium for its services as competitors tried to undercut it on price. Investors have questioned how the firm plans to keep charging high fees and how it will handle the rise of open-weight models, which make the calculations governing their systems public and which can be cheaper than Anthropic’s offerings.
Anthropic investors expect the potential market for the company’s services to be well into the trillions of dollars, eventually encompassing wide swaths of white-collar work, the people familiar with the discussions said.
As Anthropic gets closer to reaching the public markets, a large part of its pitch to investors is likely to include its consistent revenue growth of more than 10 times over the prior year, two investors familiar with the company said. A key question is whether Anthropic can get access to enough A.I. computing power — through data centers, chips and energy — to fulfill the demand for its services, the people said.
Anthropic is expected to reveal its public offering prospectus in the coming weeks and list its shares in the coming months.
The company has shared financial updates with investors before a listing. Last month, the start-up topped $65 billion in annualized revenue, or monthly revenue extrapolated to a whole year, four people with knowledge of the figures said. That was up from $9 billion in annualized revenue at the end of last year.
Anthropic generated $11.6 billion in revenue in the second quarter, a person with knowledge of the figures said.
The Financial Times reported earlier on Anthropic’s potential $2 trillion valuation, and Bloomberg reported earlier on its annualized revenue.
(The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in 2023, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The two companies have denied those claims.)
Mike Isaac contributed reporting from San Francisco.
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