Anthropic towards IPO reopens eternal competition with OpenAI
The listing project takes shape in the global race for artificial intelligence
There is the first real financial hit from the new US technology stars. And it was beaten by Anthropic, the Californian company that created the chatbot Claude and is now one of the most aggressive players in the generative wave. The company, considered by some analysts to be OpenAI's real rival, has in fact accelerated towards what could be one of the biggest listings in recent tech history. And it has appointed the law firm Wilson Sonsini to prepare the ground for a possible IPO that could come as early as 2026.
An indicrescence that immediately turned into a decisive step in the - silent but increasingly visible - race between Anthropic and OpenAI to be first on the American public market.
The news, initially reported by the Financial Times, has an important specific weight. Not least because the choice of law firm, which took place in the last few days, is not trivial: Wilson Sonsini is the same one that over the years has followed debuts on Wall Street such as those of Google, LinkedIn and Lyft. All this while it appears that Anthropic is engaged in a parallel maxi private collection that could exceed 300 billion in valuation. But the move towards a potential IPO signals an intention to test the public markets' appetite for research labs that are burning capital at an unprecedented rate, with model training costs rising exponentially.
But let us take a small step back and enter the heart of Anthropic. Leading the company is Dario Amodei, a former VP of Research at OpenAI. And by his side, there is his sister Daniela Amodei (their Italian origins are clear), who in turn was responsible for operations and safety in the company led by Sam Altman.
In short, Anthropic grew out of an internal split within OpenAI: a group of former employees, in disagreement over OpenAI's strategies and governance, left the former San Francisco start-up in 2021 to found a competing lab. That rift has now become a real industrial competition. Not least because OpenAI - the world's most famous generative AI company thanks to its chatbot ChatGPT - has a recent valuation of around USD 500 billion, and is itself engaged in preliminary work to prepare for an IPO, albeit without a definite timeline.
