Anthropic IPO Plans Grow Stronger as Daniela Amodei Defends AI Returns
Anthropic is moving closer to a public listing, and co-founder Daniela Amodei is not losing any sleep over the skeptics. Speaking at the Bloomberg Tech conference on Thursday, Amodei made a confident case for the Anthropic IPO path, pointing to the sheer scale of capital required to build and run frontier AI models.
“It’s a really big upfront cost to train the models and to serve inference on them,” she said, adding that companies pushing the frontier of AI will inevitably need access to deep capital pools, and the public market is well positioned to provide that.
The timing is no accident. Anthropic recently raised $65 billion at a $965 billion valuation, a round that was reportedly heavily oversubscribed, before filing confidentially for an IPO just days later. The company’s annualized revenue crossed $47 billion in May, a dramatic leap from roughly $9 billion at the close of 2025, signalling the kind of momentum that tends to draw public market attention.
But not everyone is convinced the AI spending boom will hold. Companies like Uber have raised concerns that not all AI investment has delivered clear returns, and there is growing chatter in corporate circles about tightening AI budgets. Amodei dismissed those concerns, arguing that businesses are still in the early innings of learning how to use the technology well. She pointed to coding, financial services, legal, and healthcare as sectors already seeing productivity gains, and said she expects that list to grow as companies get more comfortable with the tools.
On the question of infrastructure, Amodei also explained why Anthropic has held back from building its own data centers, unlike rivals OpenAI and Elon Musk’s xAI. The company’s preference is to avoid overcommitting on compute before knowing exactly how much it can productively use. That strategy led to an eyebrow-raising deal last month where Anthropic partnered with xAI for compute capacity at a cost of $1.25 billion per month, a figure later disclosed in SpaceX’s S-1 filing.
The Anthropic IPO conversation is now very much live, and if Amodei’s composure at Bloomberg Tech is anything to go by, the company is heading into the public markets with a clear story and no shortage of conviction.
