Anthropic’s IPO push collides with Amodei’s call to slow AI

Anthropic’s road to an IPO just got a lot bumpier.

While the Claude creator meets with prospective investors ahead of its potentially historic debut, co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei is pushing a concept that would seem to contradict those ambitious efforts: a slowdown.

Anthropic, valued at $965 billion earlier this year, confidentially filed its IPO prospectus in June, and has been widely expected to list its shares as soon as next month. Meanwhile, concerns about the power of advanced AI models has been intensifying for weeks, spilling into the mainstream as more researchers warn of potential threats of human extinction.

With that backdrop, Amodei wrote an essay over the weekend urging the AI industry to slow the pace of model development, proposing a three-step plan to temper how quickly model capabilities improve without “sacrificing commercial advantage or the United States’ lead in AI.”

It’s the latest challenge facing public market investors who are trying to determine what they’re willing to pay for a piece of a five-year-old company that’s already among the most valuable in the world and could seek a $2 trillion valuation in its IPO. Though Anthropic may have to accept a hit to revenue growth, some experts say an intentional slowdown could help Anthropic frame itself as a responsible actor, avoid future liability and address the public backlash towards AI that’s been brewing across the country.

“I don’t know that investors are necessarily going to see it as a negative,” Gil Luria, an equity analyst at D.A. Davidson, said in an interview. “Unless the companies are genuine and say, ‘OK, we’re not going to IPO, we’re not going to use any more compute, we’re not going to train any more models.’ That’s not what they’re saying.”

Anthropic has picked the Nasdaq as the exchange for its potential IPO, CNBC confirmed after Business Insider first reported the selection.

Amodei on Saturday proposed that model companies open up to third-party evaluators, frontier companies establish “common safety standards,” and that democratic countries coordinate with authoritarian governments “to the extent this is possible.”

His essay came after several industry researchers issued stern warnings last week about the technology’s growing potential to cause catastrophic harms. 

President Donald Trump slammed Amodei in a post on Truth Social on Monday, writing that the only “control or ‘guardrails‘ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!”

“The Trump Administration has stopped AI ‘people’ from doing bad, or potentially bad, ‘things,” like Dario (Anthropic!), who is now pretending to be a ‘perfect little angel’ – and we will continue to do so!,” Trump wrote. “We already have tremendous CRIMINAL and REGULATORY power over these companies!”

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman expressed support for Amodei’s proposal, as did Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, which owns Grok creator xAI. SpaceX went public in June in the biggest IPO on record and is now valued at $2 trillion. OpenAI has confidentially filed its IPO prospectus, but has been under fire in recent months after its models escaped containment, accessed the open internet and breached open-source developer platform Hugging Face.

“Right now would be an ill-advised moment to go public,” Altman said in an interview with Fortune, reiterating that OpenAI won’t aim for an IPO until next year. Finance chief Sarah Friar told employees during an all-hands meeting last month that the AI lab “will be a public company in 2027.” 

Lise Buyer, partner at IPO advisory firm Class V Group, said she doesn’t see the recent “we might obliterate you all” fears having an impact on IPO timing, but it could alter valuations, she said.

“The bet here is on the long term — now with tempering thoughts about control of the technology,” Buyer said in an email. “The dramatic growth and possibilities of these companies, now more publicly coupled with the potential very serious concerns and risks, will likely persist whether the IPO happens in Q4 or next year or whenever.”

Anthropic and OpenAI declined to comment for this story.

‘Don’t see why growth would slow’

Anthropic hit $65 billion in annualized revenue in July, about a sevenfold increase from the prior year, as CNBC previously reported. The company has told some shareholders that it will generate an operating profit for a second straight quarter in the current period, according to two sources familiar who asked not to be named because the details are confidential. The Financial Times earlier reported the operating profit on Sunday.

Matt Murphy, a partner at Menlo Ventures and an Anthropic investor, called the growth rate “off the charts,” and said a public listing would bring more transparency around the business.

“Don’t see why growth would slow or any other reason to wait,” Murphy told CNBC.

That transparency could also help improve what has been dismal public sentiment around the technology.

More than half of Americans say they’re more concerned than excited about the growing use of AI in daily life, up from 37% in 2021, according to a recent report from the Pew Research Center. And confidence in AI executives is even worse, according to a CNBC Generation Lab survey of 18- to 34-year-olds. More than 75% of respondents said they don’t trust Amodei to act responsibly, while around 70% expressed those views about Altman. 

“One could argue that sooner is better than later for a public offering as the accountability that comes with being a public company might be of a great interest to many,” Class V Group’s Buyer said.

Altimeter Capital CEO Brad Gerstner, whose firm is an investor in Anthropic and OpenAI, said in a post on X on Saturday that bringing more “transparency, scrutiny, accountability” and participation to AI companies is “crucial.” He said Anthropic will likely forge ahead with its IPO. 

“The market knows how to price risk – see SpaceX,” Gerstner wrote. “There is huge appetite to invest in the AI leaders.”

Gerstner’s post came a day after he blasted public remarks from industry researchers, calling them “hyperbolic scare tactics” that are “hiding behind a political agenda,” in an interview with CNBC.

There are plenty of skeptics when it comes to Amodei’s latest positioning. One argument is that Anthropic benefits from stricter standards because it currently has the most advanced models and makes money from selling services, like Claude Code, that are powered by those models.

“That could actually favor Anthropic and OpenAI if smaller competitors cannot afford the rigorous safety, evaluation and security investments required for frontier-level models,” Arun Chandrasekaran, an analyst at Gartner, told CNBC in an email.

D.A. Davidson’s Luria agrees and said he thinks Anthropic and OpenAI are engaging in “monopolistic behavior.” OpenAI has reportedly asked members of Congress for guidance about whether a coordinated, industrywide slowdown would violate antitrust law, according to Wired. 

“I’m highly suspicious of what Anthropic and OpenAI are doing,” Luria said. “It feels more and more like a ladder pull.” 

Anthropic has inked a flurry of multibillion-dollar compute deals this year, including with Nscale, Advanced Micro Devices, SpaceX, and Google. OpenAI told investors in February that it’s targeting roughly $600 billion in total compute spend by 2030. Both companies are heavy users of Nvidia’s graphics processing units.

“I would want to understand how the mix shifts between frontier training, post-training and inference as safety controls are integrated,” said Lo Toney, managing partner at Plexo Capital, and an Anthropic investor.

PitchBook analyst Harrison Rolfes is more concerned about reduced growth. He said valuations for model companies likely deserve a discount now, largely because it’s hard for investors to trust that they can safely commercialize their technology.  

“Is the first thing that you want to do as a public company go handle a bunch of security issues and vulnerability issues?” Rolfes said. “No, you probably want to focus on expanding into all the markets that you promised all your investors.”  

Gene Munster, managing partner at Deepwater Asset Management, told CNBC that any sort of perceived slowdown will be a negative because the market is “underwriting exponential uninterrupted improvements to the models.”

Still, Munster predicted that “nothing will change and the AI leapfrog game will continue.”

“AI’s long-term opportunity is too big for them to slow down,” Munster said. “I believe the comments were motivated to reduce the regulatory pressure.”

WATCH: Seems like Anthropic will beat OpenAI to IPO, says FirstMark’s Rick Heitzmann