Private investors have been flocking to get a piece of Anthropic as the AI model maker grows at a breakneck pace. Multiple investors told TechCrunch that the company’s $65 billion fundraising at a $965 billion valuation, announced last week, was greatly overhyped. Now, with that private demand still strong, Anthropic has revealed that it is taking steps towards an IPO by filing a confidential IPO.
Co-founder Daniela Amodei, speaking at the Bloomberg Tech conference on Thursday, said the decision comes down to capital. “It’s a very large upfront cost to train the models and infer them,” he said. “My guess is that over time, the kind of core set of companies that are working to push the frontier will just need access to capital, and I think the public market is very well suited for that.”
Anthropic is growing at a breakneck pace. The company announced that annual revenue topped $47 billion in May, up dramatically from about $9 billion at the end of 2025. But that trajectory faces a real test. Companies like Uber have said that while AI can deliver returns, not all of their AI spending has proven productive, raising the prospect that companies could start reining in those budgets and slowing growth across the industry.
That doesn’t bother Amodei, who believes it’s still early days for businesses to figure out how to effectively deploy AI.
“Use cases today, I expect, will continue to be the main driver of efficiency or creativity, whether it’s coding, financial services, legal, [or] health care,” he said. “But as the business community becomes more familiar with the tools, we will all learn together. I hope that over time it will become more embedded in the everyday way people do our work and actually become much more valuable.”
Amodei also looked at why, unlike rivals OpenAI and Elon Musk’s xAI, Anthropic isn’t building its own data centers to meet the company’s growing computing needs.
“Anthropic’s point of view has always been to design for the best outcome, but not to overextend ourselves so that we buy more computers than we could productively use,” he said. “It’s really hard to predict that perfectly. We’d much rather be on the side of having a little more demand for the product than we can serve than the other way around.”
Last month, the company surprised the AI industry by partnering with xAI for computing capacity, a deal later disclosed in SpaceX’s S-1 filing that costs Anthropic $1.25 billion a month.
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