Anthropic files confidential IPO as co-founder defends AI spending outlook

Anthropic has filed confidentially for an initial public offering, citing the substantial capital required to cover high upfront costs associated with model training and inference. The filing follows a $65 billion private fundraise at a $965 billion valuation, which multiple investors indicated was greatly oversubscribed. Co-founder Daniela Amodei stated that the public market is well-suited for frontier artificial intelligence companies to access the necessary funding to advance their technology.

Speaking at the Bloomberg Tech conference on Thursday, Amodei addressed investor scepticism regarding the sustainability of corporate artificial intelligence spending. She argued that businesses remain early in their effective deployment of these tools and dismissed concerns that companies might rein in their budgets. Amodei noted that while some sectors, such as Uber, have reported that not all artificial intelligence spending has proven productive, the primary drivers of efficiency and creativity in coding, financial services, legal, and healthcare will continue to fuel demand.

The company reported annualised revenue of $47 billion in May, a significant increase from approximately $9 billion at the end of 2025. This rapid growth trajectory has attracted intense interest from private investors, yet Amodei maintained that the public markets are essential for the core set of companies working to advance frontier technology. She expressed hope that as the business community becomes more familiar with the tools, artificial intelligence will become more incorporated into the day-to-day operations of work, realising greater value over time.

Unlike competitors such as OpenAI and Elon Musk’s xAI, which are building their own data centres, Anthropic has adopted a strategy of partnering for compute capacity. Amodei explained that the company prefers to avoid overextending itself by purchasing more compute than it can productively use, given the difficulty in predicting demand perfectly. The company would rather face demand for its product than risk holding excess infrastructure.

Last month, Anthropic surprised the industry by partnering with xAI for compute capacity, a deal later disclosed in SpaceX’s S-1 filing to cost the company $1.25 billion per month. This partnership underscores Anthropic’s approach to securing the necessary resources to support its growing revenue and model development without the heavy capital expenditure of owning data centres.