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Anthropic is “not very concerned” that market volatility will disrupt the AI lab’s blockbuster IPO in less than a week, Chief Executive Dario Amodei said Friday in an interview with JPMorgan boss Jamie Dimon.
The company plans to go public on the tech-heavy Nasdaq on Thursday due to a highly volatile market. US markets have been shaken by concerns over the sustainability of the AI boom and the sudden resignation of Nvidia boss Jensen Huang.
“We’re not really concerned about the exact timing, month or day, or market conditions in which we’re going to go public,” Amodei told bankers and partners at an event with Dimon hosted by JPMorgan, ahead of a listing expected to value Anthropic at around $1.5 billion.
The market disruptions have led Anthropic investors to downgrade their valuation prospects from the more than $2 trillion expected by many over the summer. Amodei said his approach to IPO pricing was to “never let your company be worth a single dollar more than its true value.”
The Anthropic co-founder added that the listing was a way for the company to maximize its liquidity and ensure it could meet huge spending plans for new computing power and infrastructure.
“Computing is the deepest business dilemma the company faces,” Amodei said. Anthropic could raise a record $100 billion or more through its IPO and simultaneous private placement.
“This area is growing very quickly from a technological point of view and we don’t know how that’s going to translate into creating economic value on the business side… We don’t know what’s going to happen next year,” he added.
The five-year-old company had more than $130 billion in liquidity at the end of September. The IPO, which is oversubscribed, could nearly double that figure and give Anthropic a “buffer” to meet its planned $900 billion in infrastructure spending over the coming years and to weather any shocks.
Amodei acknowledged that the “commitments are very important”. But he said the spending might be too conservative relative to the company’s growth prospects, in which case Anthropic would buy additional compute on the “spot market” in the near term.
Anthropic has struck deals with Elon Musk’s SpaceX worth up to $3.1 billion a month to use the rocket maker’s data center capacity. Short-term deals such as the Musk deal “cost more but we’re buying them in a world where we’re doing particularly well,” Amodei said.
The Anthropic boss also said he was not concerned about advanced AI becoming a commodity, which would erode the lab’s lead over its competitors. While the market for some applications, such as chatbots or coding tools, could become saturated, Amodei told Dimon that he believes the exponential growth of cognitive power or AI will open up new markets.
JPMorgan is a listed underwriter on Anthropic, handling sales to retail investors in the United States. Amodei told bankers gathered at the group’s New York offices that his biggest concern was cultivating the Anthropic culture.
“We don’t want people who are jerks. We don’t want people who try to steal the spotlight and don’t work well with others. We don’t want people who aren’t oriented toward the public good.”
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