Washington (United States) (AFP) – Anthropic, one of the world’s leading artificial intelligence companies, on Monday reported a more than 1,100 percent surge in quarterly revenue and nearly $900 billion in spending commitments as it counts down to its Wall Street listing later this month. The San Francisco-based company was founded in 2021 by former OpenAI researchers led by chief executive Dario Amodei and his sister Daniela, now its president, with AI safety as its focus.
The listing comes amid growing nervousness among investors about the huge sums being poured into AI. Revenue reached $17 billion in the third quarter, up from $1.4 billion a year earlier, though sales growth slowed from previous quarters amid fierce competition from ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and cheaper models, many of them from China. The company, whose stock market debut is seen as a gauge of how long the AI spending boom lifting the US economy can last, said in an amended filing that its net loss reached $23.3 billion in the July-September period. The loss stemmed mostly from non-cash accounting charges linked to the company’s rising valuation, the filing showed.
Anthropic also posted an operating loss of $567 million in the third quarter as it paid more for short-term computing capacity. The filing said the company has committed to spend about $895 billion, mostly on computing power, with $70 billion of that due before September 2027. The IPO will be a major test of the market’s faith in the AI boom, with the pool of potential investors set to widen as retail traders get their first chance to buy shares directly in a standalone AI giant. According to several media outlets, the five-year-old company plans to raise around $100 billion in its initial public offering, at a valuation of between $1.5 trillion and $2 trillion. That would surpass the record set in June by SpaceX, which raised $86 billion.
Last week, concerns about AI spending triggered a sharp sell-off in big tech stocks after the latest earnings showed massive investment without clear signs of a return. Anthropic’s roughly 400-page filing devotes more than 90 pages to risks, including those facing an industry that has seen a string of reports in recent months of AI systems behaving in unexpected and harmful ways. Anthropic’s focus on safety is built into its corporate structure. It is a public benefit corporation, legally required to weigh its mission of developing AI safely alongside shareholder returns.
The co-founders, meanwhile, will hold 50.1 percent of shareholder voting power through a single special share, leaving investors who buy on the market little say over the company’s direction. The IPO comes as more major companies involved in the AI spending bonanza turn to the markets to finance their ambitions. Meta and Google parent Alphabet have launched their own fundraising plans on the public markets, and Oracle said Monday it was going ahead with a $20 billion plan despite doubts about its financial exposure.
© 2024 AFP
