Ahead of its IPO, Anthropic’s Daniela Amodei shrugs off doubts about AI’s returns

Private investors have been clamoring to get a piece of Anthropic, fueled by the AI model maker's dizzying growth rate. The company's recent $65 billion fundraise at a $965 billion valuation was greatly oversubscribed, according to multiple investors. Now, with private demand still strong, Anthropic is taking steps toward a public listing by filing confidentially for an IPO.

At the Bloomberg Tech conference on Thursday, co-founder Daniela Amodei explained the decision to go public, citing the massive upfront costs of training and serving AI models. "It's a really big upfront cost to train the models and to serve inference on them," she said. "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." Anthropic's growth has been nothing short of explosive.

The company announced that annualized revenue crossed $47 billion in May, up dramatically from roughly $9 billion at the end of 2025. However, this trajectory faces a real test as companies like Uber have expressed doubts about the productivity of their AI spending, raising concerns that corporate budgets could be reined in and sector growth slowed. Amodei remains undeterred, believing that businesses are still in the early stages of figuring out how to deploy AI effectively.

"The use cases today, I expect will continue to be the primary driver of efficiency or creativity, whether that's coding, financial services, legal, [or] health care," she said. "But as the business community gets more familiar with the tools, we're all going to learn together. My hope is that over time it'll be more incorporated into the day-to-day of how humans do our work, and there will actually be a lot more value realized." Amodei also addressed Anthropic's strategy of not building its own data centers to meet growing compute needs, unlike rivals OpenAI and Elon Musk's xAI.

"Anthropic's view has always been wanting to plan for the best outcome but not overextend ourselves such that we're buying more compute than we could productively use," she said. "It's really hard to predict that perfectly. We would much prefer to be on the side of having a little bit more demand for the product than we're able to serve than the inverse." The company's recent partnership with xAI for compute capacity, disclosed in SpaceX's S-1 filing to cost Anthropic $1.25 billion per month, has raised eyebrows in the AI industry.

Despite this, Amodei remains confident in Anthropic's approach, and the company's preparations for a public listing are underway.