Anthropic IPO: Five things to know before its Wall Street debut

Anthropic IPO: Five things to know before its Wall Street debut

Anthropic, the artificial intelligence company behind the Claude chatbot, is expected to go public within weeksin a listing that could eclipse the record set by SpaceX's Wall Street debut in June.

Here are five things to know about the company:

Built by former OpenAI executives

Anthropic was founded in 2021 by former OpenAI executives who believed that the potential risks posed by artificial intelligence were not being taken seriously enough.

The company — whose name means, somewhat paradoxically, "relating to human beings" — is led by chief executive and co-founder Dario Amodei, a San Francisco native with a doctorate in biophysics from Princeton University, an unusual background among leading technology executives, many of whom studied computer science.

His sister, Daniela, is also a co-founder and the company's president. Anthropic has 5,000 employees, according to PitchBook.

From upstart to leading contender

Until this year, Anthropic was widely seen as trailing OpenAI, which burst onto the scene with ChatGPT in November 2022, transforming the technology industry and triggering an AI arms race.

But while OpenAI expanded into areas ranging from video generation to web browsers, Anthropic pursued a narrower strategy, focusing on artificial intelligence tools for software developers and businesses.

That strategy has paid off spectacularly: coding is one of the relatively few artificial intelligence services for which customers have proved willing to pay substantial sums.

Claude Code, its assistant for developers, has become one of the company's most popular products, helping to push Anthropic's annual revenue rate above $65bn (€55.6bn).

Only a small proportion of ChatGPT users, meanwhile, pay a subscription fee, while OpenAI has reportedly scaled back work on video generation and other projects.

Trump administration clashes with Anthropic

The momentum comes despite severe political headwinds, with Anthropic at loggerheads with the Trump administration — a dispute that could give investors pause.

In March, the government terminated its contracts with Anthropic and designated the company a supply-chain risk after it refused to give the military unfettered access to its artificial intelligence models.

Anthropic described the move as unconstitutional retaliation and launched legal action against the US government. The dispute could take years to resolve.