Anthropic is moving on several fronts at once, and the pieces point toward one of the largest public offerings ever attempted by a technology company.
According to the New York Times, as relayed by Techmeme, the company's bankers have told potential investors in recent discussions that Anthropic could raise more than $100 billion in its IPO — an offering that could value the five-year-old AI startup at $2 trillion.
That pitch arrives alongside a candid admission. CNBC reports, citing sources, that Anthropic's IPO filing will list public backlash against AI as a risk factor. The company is poised to debut on the stock market at a moment when the public is increasingly upset about data centers and fearful about AI taking jobs. Naming that anger in a securities filing is notable: risk factors are where companies tell investors what could go wrong, and Anthropic is effectively saying that public sentiment itself is a business threat.
On the hardware side, Bloomberg's Dina Bass reports that Anthropic has hired Amir Salek, a founder of the custom chip program at Alphabet's Google who ran the TPU business until 2022. Salek joins Anthropic's compute team as part of a push to develop the company's own chips — a signal that Anthropic wants more control over the silicon its models run on rather than depending entirely on outside suppliers.
Meanwhile, the product keeps moving. Cryptobriefing reports that Anthropic has advanced its Claude AI with a new collaborative workspace integration.
Taken together, the threads describe a company simultaneously building its own hardware foundation, expanding what Claude can do for teams, and preparing to sell shares to the public — while telling those same investors that ordinary people's frustration with AI is a real hazard to the business.
Why it matters: an offering of this scale would tie a broad swath of public investors to the fortunes of AI, at exactly the moment the industry is conceding that public opinion may not be on its side.