Anthropic IPO talks set up Wall Street showdown with OpenAI

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Anthropic is in talks to launch one of the biggest ever initial public offerings as early as next year, according to reports, in a move that pushed its rivalry with OpenAI towards a new arena: the stock market.

The Claude chatbot maker has tapped law firm Wilson Sonsini to begin working on a potential float, reported the Financial Times, citing people familiar with the matter, while the startup has also held similar early talks with investment banks.

Rival OpenAI has already been forced to deny multiple reports that it is considering an IPO in the next year or so, with its chief financial officer recently saying it is not going to list in the near term.

Nonetheless, Anthropic’s talks have set it on a new collision course with the ChatGPT maker — one that would see the two loss-making startups competing for vast amounts of investor cash on Wall Street, a new front in the fast-accelerating AI race.

“It’s fairly standard practice for companies operating at our scale and revenue level to effectively operate as if they are publicly traded companies,” said an Anthropic spokesperson, per the FT. “We haven’t made any decisions about when or even whether to go public, and don’t have any news to share at this time.”

Anthropic recently hired former Airbnb executive Krishna Rao, who played an important role in the firm’s 2020 IPO. Meanwhile, CNBC reported last month that Anthropic had got investments of up to $5 billion from Microsoft and $10 billion from Nvidia that valued it at about $350 billion.

However, an IPO from either company would be a key test of whether investors are still nervous about the industry effectively operating in a bubble. Google chief executive Sundar Pichai and OpenAI boss Sam Altman have both admitted many tech stocks are overvalued in the last six months.

And the heads of Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are among the Wall Street figures to have predicted a sharp comedown for global stock markets over the next two years or so.

That has not stopped the vast sums of cash flowing towards the AI hyperscalers, however. Anthropic recently announced a $50 billion AI infrastructure build-out with data centers in Texas in New York, while in September it committed to tripling its overseas workforce.