Anthropic opens books on AI's explosive growth and staggering costs

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Oct 26 : Anthropic unveiled its US IPO filing on Monday, laying out its ambitions to build AI systems capable of transforming the global economy while confronting the costs and challenges of developing the technology.

The prospectus highlights Anthropic's rapid growth over the past year, fueled by Big Tech's breakneck spending that has driven a rally in AI stocks while raising concerns about lofty valuations and rising debt.

The IPO is expected to establish Anthropic, the AI lab behind the viral Claude models, as a benchmark for how Wall Street values leading AI companies, including rival OpenAI.

Anthropic is pressing ahead with its IPO plans even as a once-busy fall listing calendar has thinned out, with market volatility prompting companies to delay offerings. The IPO would give Anthropic access to a deep pool of capital to fund its costly AI ambitions, which require heavy investment in computing infrastructure to develop and operate sophisticated models.

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Global equities have sold off sharply as investors grow uneasy with the debt-fueled AI investment boom and start to doubt if the trillions being poured into data centers, chips and computing capacity will generate returns fast enough to support lofty valuations. Higher borrowing costs and rising bond yields have added to their caution.

Some current and prospective investors are valuing Anthropic at about $1.5 trillion, down from roughly $2 trillion a week ago, after the AI startup disclosed some financial details at a recent investor event, Reuters reported.

The filing confirmed a series of Reuters exclusives that offered an early peek at its contents before Anthropic made it public, including details of its financial performance, growth trajectory and IPO plans.

The IPO comes as Anthropic's own research raises concerns about advanced AI systems, which in controlled tests have demonstrated behaviors including code sabotage, fraud assistance and information manipulation.

Those findings have fueled concerns about how companies can keep increasingly powerful AI systems under control as they race to deploy them commercially.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has called on the global AI community to slow the release of new capabilities to address those risks. The company has since rolled out its Opus 5.5 model, seeking to keep pace with ChatGPT maker OpenAI after the launch of the GPT-6 Astra model.

Anthropic, founded in 2021 by a team of researchers, was valued at $965 billion in May in a funding round that drew some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley and Wall Street.

Amazon and Google were among Anthropic's early strategic partners, investing billions of dollars in the startup while providing the cloud infrastructure needed to train and deploy Claude models.

Anthropic remains locked in a fierce battle with OpenAI to lead the race to build the most advanced AI systems. The ChatGPT maker confidentially filed for an IPO in June and is expected to list by early 2027.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in September the company would not go public this year, citing AI safety concerns and describing even a 10 per cent risk of AI causing human extinction by the end of the decade as "unacceptable".

Anthropic's IPO follows that of Elon Musk's SpaceX, which rewrote the IPO record books in June, when it priced a $75 billion offering that valued the company at $1.75 trillion.

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