Anthropic’s S-1 filing on Monday was confidential, but there’s much we already know about the $965 billion AI juggernaut.
[Dario] thinks Anthropic could surpass OpenAI as the world’s largest AI company by revenue. “I would argue it’s maybe even the most likely world in which our revenue passes theirs a year from now,” he says. Then he pauses before adding, “I think I’d rather have the largest revenue than the largest data center, because one is black [on an income statement], and the other is red. Again, things I’ve had to learn about business: It’s better to make money than just to lose money.
What a difference a few months can make. Anthropic’s annualized revenue run rate hit $47 billion in May, and while that’s no guarantee of the future, it is astonishing. It’s dazzling not only for its scale, but for the way that, in half a decade, upstart Anthropic seems to have gotten a leg-up on ChatGPT maker OpenAI (comparatively last valued at $852 billion).
The relentless demand for Anthropic’s May Series H—which raised $65 billion and kicked the company’s valuation up to near-one-trillion—was so intense that it facilitated concerns about financial shenanigans across the private markets, looking to particularly capitalize on both AI FOMO and Anthropic FOMO. There is also some speculation that if Anthropic makes it to the public markets first, it could dampen demand for its less profitable rival. That’s the chess match aspect that’s undoubtedly playing out behind the scenes.
A few vital caveats, the most important of which is: A confidential S-1 is still a maybe. We have no real numbers yet, and timing remains touch-and-go. (I’ve seen many confidential S-1s go nowhere at all. The filing can be withdrawn at any time, and sometimes the public never hears about it.) So, everything has an asterisk for now; Anthropic could go public this summer, this fall, or never.
We may already know quite a bit about Anthropic, but if the company continues following the IPO path, we will soon learn a lot more.
