“We are very paranoid”: a few days before its IPO, the boss of Anthropic defends his priority given to AI security

Anthropic boss Dario Amodei tried to convince investors on Friday that his company remained obsessed with the security of artificial intelligence (AI) and uncompromising on its recruitment, a few days before one of the most important IPOs in history. “We are very paranoid,” he assured Jamie Dimon, boss of JPMorgan Chase, the largest American bank, who organized the exchange in New York.

Security has shaped, according to him, the culture and strategy of the start-up, oriented towards businesses and computer programming tools rather than towards the general public, a choice contrary to its great rival OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT, the most used assistant in the world. “We deliberately chose the companies because we understood that it was in synergy with our priority given to security,” he said.

Assistant designer Claude on Tuesday set a range of $70 to $78 per share for its Nasdaq debut, expected Thursday under the ticker "ANT." At its highest, the operation would raise up to 64 billion dollars and value the company at around 1,400 billion, far from the 2,000 billion mentioned until the beginning of the fall. The operation comes at a delicate time for the sector, whose shares are yo-yoing on the stock market due to growing doubts about the profitability of the colossal sums invested in AI.

Nvidia, the world number one in chips for AI and shareholder of Anthropic, has also just lost its very influential boss, Jensen Huang, swept away by the scandal of his extramarital affairs, against a backdrop of suspicions of spying on China and smuggling of chips for AI. Doctor of physics, Dario Amodei, who co-founded Anthropic in 2021 after leaving OpenAI, assured that the company would continue to open new markets by pushing the limits of its technology.

“The cognitive capabilities (of the models) are growing exponentially and (...) new markets are opening up,” he explained, predicting that areas like scientific research will become markets “much more important than computer programming,” the heart of its current revenues and itself much more lucrative than conversational assistants for the general public.

He says he devotes “probably 40, 50%” of his time to recruiting and corporate culture, “the most important things.” Each recruit goes through an interview dedicated to the company culture, and brilliant candidates have been rejected because they don't match it, he said. “We don’t want any bad guys. We do not want people who seek to pull the wool over their eyes and do not work well with others,” he insisted, calling for collaborators “oriented towards the general interest.”