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They grow up so fast. Anthropic, a maker of artificial intelligence models and rival to OpenAI, has hired lawyers ahead of an initial public offering that could value it at $350bn next year. By that point the company would have reached the not-at-all-grand age of five.
That makes it a pretty good example of AI companies’ turbocharged growth. As a comparison, Google went public six years after its founding, achieving a valuation of about $23bn. Facebook took eight years to spring into public markets with roughly a $100bn price tag. The geriatric Microsoft waited 11 years and debuted in 1986 at around $800mn.
Behind the hype, at least, is a business. Anthropic’s main product is its chatbot Claude. That generates revenue, if not yet profit: Anthropic has projected that it could make $70bn in sales by 2028, The Information has reported. That would put its mooted valuation at five times that sum. Meta went public in 2012 at, with hindsight, a multiple of six times its three-year-hence sales; China’s Alibaba at seven times and Palantir at 10.
When investors do get the chance to buy stock in Anthropic directly, joining existing backers Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Nvidia, they will be benchmarking it particularly closely with OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, whose latest valuation of $500bn is also five times 2028 projections.
Who wins the bake-off depends on what flavours an investor prefers. Anthropic seems more popular with companies, with a 32 per cent share of the “enterprise” market as of the end of July, according to Menlo Ventures — which it should be noted is an Anthropic investor. That’s helpful, because businesses are more likely to pay up for AI than consumers.
Anthropic is also a more narrow business. It builds models, and that’s about it. OpenAI, meanwhile, is investing in data centres, pocket-sized devices, other companies’ shares and its own web browser. Some might call that sprawl; a venture capitalist might be more likely to call it “full stack”. Seen that way, Anthropic might more resemble a Palantir or a Salesforce, where OpenAI has shades of Google parent Alphabet or Microsoft.
Perhaps the toughest thing to value is what Anthropic might see as its greatest asset: its principles. The company was founded to be a safer alternative to OpenAI, building bots that are “helpful, honest and harmless”. Indeed, the Center for AI Safety deems Anthropic’s products the least likely among major models to “overtly lie” or furnish answers to “hazardous expert-level virology queries”.
Whether investors will pay a premium for that — or instead demand a discount — remains to be seen. In the meantime, much can happen. By the time it goes public, if it does, AI may have taken another leap forward, or tripped on its own hype. It’s therefore worth thinking about how Anthropic might justify a $350bn valuation — while also being prepared to tear those assumptions up and start again.
john.foley@ft.com