Anthropic has been meeting with potential investors ahead of what could be a record-breaking IPO to assuage their concerns around the many challenges facing the AI industry, according to a report.
The Silicon Valley giant – worth a whopping $965 billion – is targeting a stock market debut this fall that could end up surpassing Elon Musk’s mammoth SpaceX IPO, though the AI industry is facing several hurdles that have left investors wary.
In recent weeks, potential investors have grilled Anthropic on how it expects a handful of challenges to hit growth. Those range from cheaper Chinese rivals and regulatory hurdles to heated backlash against data centers and concerns about massive spending, according to the Wall Street Journal.
During these pre-IPO meetings, Anthropic executives have played down the threat of Chinese competition, arguing that they are focused on delivering the latest cutting-edge technology that can beat out rivals, the Journal reported.
Anthropic also told some investors that it plans to push into AI’s healthcare and biology uses, which could tamp down the growing negative public sentiment around the new tech, sources told the Journal.
There has been huge uncertainty around whether tech companies’ multibillion-dollar commitments to AI spending will eventually pay off, or whether it’s a repeat of the late 1990s “dot-com bubble” – resulting in choppy trading for AI-exposed stocks.
Anthropic has been seen as the front-runner in the global AI race largely thanks to its successful coding tool, Claude Code, and its ultra-powerful bot, Claude Mythos.
But reports of Mythos running rampant during internal testing and trying to hack into services using fake identities has fueled safety concerns around the potential risks surrounding top AI models.
All eyes are on Anthropic’s public debut – which is expected in September or early October – since the price it selects will set the tone for how investors value other major AI companies, according to the Journal.
Rival OpenAI is expected to make its own stock market debut as late as next year.
The AI public offerings come in the wake of SpaceX’s recording-breaking IPO in June. The tech giant surpassed $2 trillion in trading, briefly making Musk the world’s first trillionaire.
Since then, the stock has slumped more than 16% to $134.60 a share, just below its IPO price of $135 – a potential warning sign of the rocky trading that other massive IPOs, which are mostly trading on public sentiment and potential payoffs, could see.
In the meantime, Anthropic has been signing huge, multibillion-dollar computing partnerships with AI startups and large companies like SpaceX and Google, as firms compete for a limited supply of the computing power needed to power data centers.
In May, Anthropic reported that its run-rate revenue – a prediction of annual revenue – had surpassed $47 billion on resilient demand for its Claude Code tool. It has continued to see robust demand for its AI and coding tools.
CEO Dario Amodei has repeatedly insisted that most users want the latest and greatest AI models, meaning Anthropic should stay in the lead as long as it can continue to churn out bots that beat China’s alternatives.
Anthropic did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment.