Anthropic, maker of Claude, prepares historic US stock market debut

An Initial Public Offering (IPO) is the process through which a company goes public and makes its shares available to retail investors. When a company is ready to go public, it hires an investment bank or, in some cases, several banks, to underwrite its IPO. This year, alongside Anthropic, two other companies are preparing to go public: Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Sam Altman’s OpenAI, which helped spark the AI boom in 2022 with the launch of ChatGPT.

ChatGPT developer OpenAI was valued at 2 billion in March, while Anthropic, creator of the AI model Claude, has raised capital at a valuation of 5 billion. (File photo)

Anthropic, founded five years ago by chief executive Dario Amodei and a group of former AI executives and researchers, recently raised funding from private investors that valued the company at more than $965 billion. The company has experienced explosive growth in recent years, driven largely by the popularity of its AI tools. The company’s Claude Code, an AI-powered coding tool that generates computer code from natural-language prompts, allowing people people with little or no programming experience to build their own applications and software, has been well-received in the industry.

Earlier this year, Anthropic unveiled Claude Mythos Preview, an AI model with advanced cybersecurity capabilities. However, its relationship with the federal government has thawed since the model’s release.

While Anthropic remains one of strong AI labs on the market, it has primarily focused on developing AI tools for coding and enterprise customers. By contrast, competitors such as Google and OpenAI now offer a wide array of AI products, ranging from image-generation tools to AI-powered web browsers. Even so, investor interest in Anthropic remains strong.

OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei. (Image: Wikimedia Commons)

However, Anthropic faces intense competition from a growing number of AI startups and major technology companies, many of which are investing billions of dollars in artificial intelligence and regularly acquiring smaller AI firms. Its primary rival remains OpenAI, which was reportedly valued at $852 billion in late March and is also said to be exploring the possibility of going public later this year. Meanwhile, Musk’s SpaceX recently said it has secured an option to acquire the code-generation startup Cursor for $60 billion later this year, giving it access to the lucrative market for AI developer tools.