Anthropic forges ahead with IPO roadshow, eyes $1.4 trillion valuation

Unlike its biggest competitor, OpenAI, Anthropic doesn't appear to be backing away from its IPO.

Anthropic, the AI giant behind the Claude chatbot, is preparing for an IPO roadshow, according to an announcement from the company. An IPO roadshow is basically a series of sales presentations to potential investors in order to gauge interest and set a final share price.

Interestingly, Anthropic is looking to go public at a $1.4 trillion valuation. This is lower than investor expectations, which reportedly reached $2 trillion just two months ago.

Anthropic's decision to go forward with an IPO is in sharp contrast to the approach of its largest competitor, OpenAI, which has largely shied away from doing so anytime in the near future. Anthropic beat OpenAI to an IPO filing earlier this summer when both AI companies were still pursuing a public stock offering. Since then, OpenAI has put its IPO plans on hold, citing concerns around AI safety.

Anthropic's IPO will be a first among the big AI companies, and it comes as investors' faith in the AI boom seems to be waning.

One major issue for investors is that the big players in the AI industry are simply unprofitable. Anthropic's prospectus, which lays out its finances for potential investors, says that the company brought in $4.6 billion in revenue last year and posted a $42 billion loss. On top of that, Anthropic's operating costs are rising year over year, and the company plans to spend $518 billion in "cloud, computing and infrastructure obligations" over the next few years.

As Reuters reports, some of Anthropic's current investors are hoping to sell 825 million shares at $78 per share to raise as much as $64.4 billion. However, according to outlets like CNBC, Anthropic is considering a price range of $70 to $78 per share.

According to those same sources, Anthropic aims to set the share price on Nov. 18 and go public on Nov. 19.