AI model provider Anthropic revealed on Monday that it has submitted a draft registration statement for an IPO. The move underscores the generative AI vendor’s success but also creates tension around its ethical commitments.
The filing comes after the Claude creator revealed on May 28 that its valuation had shot up to $965 billion following a $65 billion Series H funding round, surpassing rival OpenAI’s $852 valuation.
“Everything of late indicates that Anthropic is well positioned to maintain its current situation, with respect to the others as the most widely recognized … most powerful model,” said Michael G Bennet, associate vice chancellor for Data Science and AI strategy at the University of Illinois Chicago. “The most widely recognized as being significantly more advanced than the others.”
While OpenAI GPT models are competitive with Anthropic Claude models, Anthropic has spent the last few years solidifying its reputation as the responsible AI vendor of choice, based on its constitutional AI foundation and its refusal to let the federal government use its technology for mass surveillance and autonomous weapons systems.
At the same time, the vendor aggressively pursued the enterprise market, a direction OpenAI didn’t start pursuing in earnest until last year. Even though OpenAI models helped bring wide adoption to generative AI, Anthropic focused on the enterprise market by making Claude the premium enterprise coding model.
The Commitment to Responsible AI
Anthropic went head-to-head with the Trump administration earlier this year by refusing to let its models be used for some military activities. While the fight against the administration could have eroded its market share, Anthropic showed enterprises and consumers that the AI lab could be trusted to deliver responsible AI. This trust was magnified to some when Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah met with Pope Leo XIV at the Vatican on May 25 and, together with the Pope, called for global moral oversight of AI.
“The company seems to be building a really powerful moat around itself,” Bennett said, referring to model performance and moral responsibility in deploying the model.
He added that Anthropic’s positioning contrasts with both that of Elon Musk’s xAI company and OpenAI. While SpaceX filed for IPO in April, a move that could make founder Musk the world’s trillionaire, xAI’s model, Grok, has been involved in several controversial situations and has at times been associated with Musk’s outspoken conservative politics. OpenAI, which is expected to file its own IPO soon, has been accused by some of veering from its original mission of openness and prioritizing profit over responsibility.
A Paradox of Responsibility
However, while Anthropic has maintained its reputation as a responsible AI company, the IPO filing brings new pressure. If Anthropic’s IPO is successful and the vendor becomes a publicly traded company, it can’t switch its mode of operation and suddenly become focused solely on maximizing shareholder value, Bennett said.
“It has to tack very closely to its mission statement as well, including all of the rigorous, ethical application and responsible AI policies that we understand to be in effect there,” he said. The challenge, though, is that, despite its success, Anthropic must compete with players less constrained by ethical commitments.
