source: techcrunch ai: ahead of its ipo, anthropic’s daniela amodei shrugs off doubts about ai’s returns
level: business
anthropic has confidentially filed for an initial public offering, co-founder daniela amodei said at the bloomberg tech conference. the move follows a $65 billion private fundraise at a $965 billion valuation that was heavily oversubscribed. amodei explained that training and running frontier ai models requires huge upfront capital, and public markets are a good fit for that need. the company's annualized revenue hit $47 billion in may, up from about $9 billion at the end of 2025.
some companies like uber have said not all ai spending is productive, raising fears of budget cuts. amodei is not worried, arguing businesses are still early in learning how to use ai effectively. she expects current use cases in coding, finance, legal, and healthcare to drive efficiency and creativity. as companies get more familiar with the tools, she believes ai will become more embedded in daily work, unlocking more value over time.
unlike rivals openai and xai, anthropic is not building its own data centers. amodei said the company prefers to avoid overcommitting to compute it might not use, even if that means sometimes having more demand than capacity. last month, anthropic surprised the industry by partnering with xai for compute, a deal costing $1.25 billion per month according to a spacex filing.
why it matters: anthropic's ipo and growth signal how ai model makers are scaling, but questions about enterprise ai spending returns could affect the whole sector's trajectory.
source: techcrunch ai: ahead of its ipo, anthropic’s daniela amodei shrugs off doubts about ai’s returns