Anthropic CEO says he is not too worried about market turbulence before the IPO

San Francisco and New York | FT

The company plans to go public next Thursday (19) on Nasdaq, an exchange with a strong concentration of technology companies, amid highly volatile trading.

US markets have been roiled by anxiety over the sustainability of the AI ​​boom and the resignation of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.

"We're not too concerned about the exact moment — the month, the day or the market conditions — when we go public," Amodei told bankers and partners at an event with Dimon hosted by J.P. Morgan. The debut on the Stock Exchange should value Anthropic at around US$ 1.5 trillion (R$ 8.5 trillion).

Market turmoil led Anthropic investors to reduce their value projections for the company, which at one point expected it to exceed US$2 trillion (R$11.3 trillion). Amodei stated that his approach to pricing the IPO was to "never allow your company to be worth a single dollar more than it is."

The Anthropic co-founder added that the IPO was a way for the company to maximize available cash and ensure it could meet huge investment plans in new computing capacity and infrastructure.

"Computational capacity is the most profound business dilemma facing the company," Amodei said. Anthropic could raise a record amount of US$100 billion (R$566.8 billion) or more in the IPO and in a simultaneous private placement operation.

"This field is growing very quickly from a technological perspective, and we don't know how that will translate into creating economic value for businesses... We don't know what will happen next year," he added.

The company, founded five years ago, had more than US$130 billion (R$734 billion) in cash at the end of September. The IPO, whose demand exceeds supply, could almost double this amount and give Anthropic a "reserve" to meet the US$900 billion (R$5.1 trillion) in infrastructure investments planned for the coming years, in addition to facing possible shocks.

Amodei acknowledged that the "commitments are very high". But he said the spending may be too conservative given the company's growth prospects and that, in that case, Anthropic would buy additional computing capacity on the short-term "spot market."

Anthropic closed agreements with Elon Musk's SpaceX worth up to US$3.1 billion (R$17.1 billion) per month to use the capacity of the rocket manufacturer's data centers. Short-term deals like the one with Musk "cost more, but we are buying in a context where we are performing particularly well," Amodei said.

The head of Anthropic also said he was not worried about the possibility of advanced AI becoming a commodity, which would reduce the laboratory's advantage over competitors. While the market for certain applications, such as chatbots or programming tools, may become saturated, Amodei told Dimon he was confident that the exponential growth of cognitive capacity or AI would open up new markets.

J.P. Morgan is one of the coordinators of Anthropic's IPO and manages 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 Anthropic's 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 focused on the public benefit."