Anthropic President Says Training Costs Drive AI Companies Toward Public Market

The cost of training AI models is driving companies like Anthropic to go public, Anthropic Co-Founder and President Daniela Amodei said Thursday (June 4).

Speaking at the Bloomberg Tech conference, Amodei said: “It’s a really big upfront cost to train the models and to serve inference on them. And I think that my guess is that over time, the sort of core set of companies that are working to advance the frontier are just going to need access to capital. And I think the public market is very well suited to that.”

Asked if Anthropic is racing to hold the first initial public offering among AI companies, Amodei declined to comment.

Anthropic announced Monday (June 1) that it confidentially filed for an IPO by submitting a draft registration to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

“This gives us the option to go public after the SEC completes its review,” the company said when announcing the move. “The proposed initial public offering will depend on market conditions and other factors.”

The Financial Times reported that the company’s plans set up a three-way race to go public between Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceX and that these would represent three of the largest stock market listings ever.

Four days before announcing its filing for an IPO, on May 28, Anthropic said it raised $65 billion in a Series H funding round that valued the company at $965 billion post-money. The company said the round included previously committed investments of $15 billion from hyperscalers, including $5 billion from Amazon.

“This latest funding is expected to advance our safety and interpretability research, expand compute to meet growing demand for Claude, and scale the products and partnerships our customers rely on,” Anthropic said in its announcement.

Alphabet announced Wednesday (June 3) that it plans to raise $84.75 billion in equity capital to expand its AI infrastructure. That marked an increase from the $80 billion the company had announced two days earlier.

Reuters reported that Alphabet’s move reflected investor interest in tech companies that are expanding their AI infrastructure and computing power. The report added that the company said in April that it was increasing its annual capital spending forecast by $5 billion to between $180 billion and $190 billion.

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