$1.4 trillion valuation: Anthropic's crazy ambition for its IPO

Anthropic, the designer of the artificial intelligence (AI) assistant Claude, declared on Tuesday November 10 that it hoped to achieve one of the largest IPOs in history, with a valuation of up to $1.4 trillion.

In a document filed with the American stock market watchdog (SEC), the company indicates that it wants to put up for sale 825 million shares at a unit price of between $70 and $78, which would allow it to raise up to $64 billion.

To this amount will be added 26 billion from the sale of non-voting shares to technology companies that are partners of Anthropic, such as chip specialists Nvidia and AMD or Alphabet, the parent company of Google.

At the highest of the envisaged range, the fundraising will allow the creator of Claude to display a valuation of around 1,400 billion dollars. A colossal sum for a company created five years ago, but below the record set in June by SpaceX, Elon Musk's company, and its 1.770 billion.

Several American media had put forward more optimistic estimates, but the start-up is suffering from stock market turbulence in the AI ​​sector, due in particular to the dizzying amounts swallowed up by the development of cutting-edge models.

The Democratic victory in the mid-term elections in the United States, with the prospect of tougher regulations for data centers, added to the tension.

On the contrary, for Larry Li, founder of the Amino Capital fund in Palo Alto (California), “a more reasonable valuation is probably healthy for the entire sector”. “A few big AI companies are sucking up all the capital, which is really not very healthy for the whole ecosystem,” he explained at the Web Summit in Lisbon.

Anthropic could take its first steps on the Nasdaq as early as mid-November, under the symbol “ANT”. Dario Amodei must defend the operation on Friday November 13 in New York during a live broadcast with Jamie Dimon, boss of the JP Morgan bank.

According to the document shared on Tuesday, the company achieved revenue of $17 billion in the third quarter, compared to $1.4 billion a year earlier.

Machine-translated from French