Anthropic, the private company behind Claude, a leading AI model, just entered the big money stakes right behind SpaceX. On Monday, the company announced it had “confidentially submitted” draft paperwork to the SEC for an initial public offering (IPO) of common shares.
The announcement is just two brief paragraphs of uninformative and strictly boilerplate legalese. Little details like how much of the company’s shares will go on the market, at what price, or even when are left unsaid on the company’s news page. The “confidential” part is everything the SEC now knows from the draft S-1 but we don’t.
Wedbush Securities, however, called the mystery announcement “an opening of the floodgates for the IPO market.” Calling the market “relatively dormant” for the last few years, Wedbush analysts now say that “with these three major conglomerates set to go public later this year” — that’s SpaceX, Anthropic, and likely OpenAI — the massive IPO game “has turned into a race to reach public markets over the coming months.”
The draft filing comes just one week after Anthropic announced it was a nearly trillion-dollar company, following another round of fundraising at a valuation of $965 billion.
Not bad for a firm that has yet to turn a profit, and is believed to have lost $10 billion since its founding in 2021. Hell, Anthropic likely has yet to generate positive cash flow, according to the best public sources I could find. Then again, I was using rival xAI’s Grok to search, and you know how biased these LLMs can be.
That isn’t the only headwind Anthropic faces prior to going public.
Over at Axios, Madison Mills reported Tuesday that corporate America is now in its “AI sticker shock phase,” as companies like Anthropic begin squeezing customers in pursuit of that still-elusive positive cash flow. “An early Anthropic investor tells Axios that companies are waking up to how much they’re spending on Claude,” and called it “a risk worth monitoring.”
Anthropic pushed Claude hard into the corporate space, creating plenty of big-ticket customers — some of which might have second thoughts about how much they spend on AI. Last week, Uber president and COO Andrew Macdonald admitted that his company burned through its annual Claude budget in just four months.
The reason will make you laugh. Fortune reported that the unsustainable burn rate happened “after incentivizing employees to adopt the technology through an internal leaderboard ranking teams by total AI tool usage.”
Employees were ranked not by how well they used Claude to generate additional income or save the company money, but by how much they used Claude. In other words, Uber incentivized employees to burn through AI tokens regardless of outcome, and marveled four months later how the company wasted so much money so quickly.
Anything that can’t go on forever will stop, economist Herbert Stein noted five decades ago, and reports like that one about Uber sure make it feel like AI is the biggest bubble since the Dutch went crazy for tulips.
But then there’s the sharpest business analyst I know of, Stratechery’s Ben Thompson, who argued earlier this year that AI’s “economic imperatives are going to be impossible to resist, and will fuel demand for even more compute over time, further supporting the case that this is no bubble.”
In that same report, he argued that Anthropic “got it right by focusing almost entirely on the enterprise market.”
Time will tell, and investors will get a chance to bet on the outcome probably three times this year, as SpaceX, Anthropic, and maybe even OpenAI all go public before the end of the year.
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