The parallels between the most important initial public offering of the internet era — Google’s in 2004 — and the apparently imminent IPO of what might be the defining artificial-intelligence company of our day — Anthropic — are portentous.
If Anthropic succeeds in selling shares to the public before Thanksgiving, it will herald the arrival of not just a newly public company, like Google 22 years ago, but also the birth of an industry. The many ways Anthropic mirrors the Google of the mid-aughts — and the critical ways it is different — speak to where Silicon Valley and society have traveled in a generation.
Google went public at the then-astounding valuation of $23 billion. That was a fraction of Microsoft’s market value of nearly $300 billion. But Google was then only six years old. Anthropic, founded in 2021, is said to be seeking a valuation of $2 trillion. That, too, is less than the stratospheric market caps of Nvidia and Apple, both around $5 trillion, but unfathomable for a company with Anthropic’s limited track record.
The Google of yesteryear and the Anthropic of today share similar positions in the young market for their wares. Just as Anthropic was not first to market with its Claude AI assistant — OpenAI’s ChatGPT taught the marketplace about “generative” AI — Google followed Yahoo into the “search engine” business. Though Anthropic has not eclipsed OpenAI in the way that Google eventually smothered Yahoo, Claude has succeeded in overshadowing ChatGPT, which hogged the limelight for a hot AI minute.
Anthropic’s co-founder and CEO, Dario Amodei, and Google’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, share a penchant for epistolary verbosity. The Google boys, just around 30 when their company went public, wrote a famous letter to prospective shareholders in their company’s IPO prospectus, warning that “Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one.” Amodei, 43, is a prolific writer, frequently posting his thoughts about AI’s impact on the world. His most recent dispatch was a 3,800-word plea for AI companies to slow their roll.
There is a shared cleverness in the way that Google, which in 2026 is very much a conventional company, and Anthropic communicate. Signaling a determination to play by its own rules was a strategic advantage for Google, which raised eyebrows with the slogan “Don’t Be Evil,” featured prominently when the company went public and then quietly retired from its code of conduct in 2018. From its earliest days, Anthropic has positioned itself as the AI company concerned about safety — a jab at OpenAI, where Amodei worked before co-founding his own firm. Anthropic’s stated mission is “the responsible development and maintenance of advanced AI for the long-term benefit of humanity.” Urging AI players to pause to consider the calamitous possibilities of their efforts can be simultaneously genuine and a shrewd maneuver to protect Anthropic’s commercial advantage.
Even the market conditions confronting these two pioneering companies on the verge of their IPOs are similar. Google’s leaders feared a choppy market in 2004 because Yahoo had recently reported weak results, souring investors on internet stocks. Anthropic, which has already been meeting with potential institutional investors, is now deciding whether it should plunge ahead with its offering despite market volatility that has already pushed other companies to delay their public debuts.
Anthropic is not Google, of course, and there are considerable differences between the two. Google’s product was beloved by consumers, who didn’t pay to use it. Anthropic has positioned itself as a darling of businesses, which pay for subscriptions for its premium versions.
Google was already wildly profitable at the time of the IPO; Anthropic not so much. Google had earned nearly $150 million in just the first half of 2004, and its cash-printing business model of selling high-margin ads delighted investors. According to a report in Reuters, which got a sneak peek at Anthropic’s shareholder prospectus, the company had an operating loss of $8 billion last year. Its appetite for ever more computing power is a drain on potential profits.
Google went public for one chief reason: A securities law, since amended, required companies with more than 500 shareholders to file their financial results publicly. Google figured that if it was going to disclose this information, it might as well reap the benefits of being a public company. Anthropic badly needs additional financing to fund its massive investments in data-center capacity. If its IPO doesn’t fly, Anthropic will raise yet more cash from private investors.
Perhaps the biggest difference between the two companies is the risks faced in their IPOs. Google’s biggest concern was being able to manage its growth. Whether its innovative approach to digital advertising ultimately worked on a large scale meant little to society. The success of Anthropic, and of its entire industry, represents a self-acknowledged risk to humanity. “Our development of highly advanced models, platforms, and applications and expansion of use cases could further increase the risk that our models cause harm,” the company warns, per Reuters, which noted that 80 pages of the 261-page prospectus are devoted to risks, compared with 48 describing its business.
Google’s IPO represented a paradigm shift in the digital economy. The stakes are considerably higher for Anthropic, whose actions, it is no exaggeration to assert, might well affect civilization as we know it.
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