Anthropic co-founder and President Daniela Amodei has publicly explained the rationale behind the company’s confidential IPO filing, telling the Bloomberg Tech conference that access to public capital markets is essential for companies competing at the AI frontier. She described the upfront cost of training and serving large models as enormous, and said public markets are well suited to providing the sustained capital that frontier AI development requires.
The filing follows Anthropic’s $65 billion fundraise at a $965 billion valuation, which multiple investors described to TechCrunch as heavily oversubscribed. Annualised revenue reached $47 billion in May, up sharply from roughly $9 billion at the end of 2025. Amodei acknowledged concerns that some enterprise AI spending — such as Uber’s — has yet to demonstrate clear productivity returns, but said businesses remain early in understanding how to deploy AI effectively, pointing to coding, financial services, legal, and healthcare as sectors where value will compound over time.
Amodei also addressed Anthropic’s decision not to build its own data centres, arguing the company prefers to avoid overcommitting to compute it cannot productively use. That philosophy led to a $1.25 billion per month compute agreement with xAI, disclosed in SpaceX’s S-1 filing, which surprised much of the industry given the competitive dynamics between the two firms.
