What smart people are saying about Anthropic’s IPO

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said Anthropic’s IPO filing doesn’t change what he sees as the real race in artificial intelligence.

“I think there is a race to deliver the best technology, build the best business,” Altman told CNBC, adding that going public is simply “a financing event.”

Altman also pushed back on the idea that a single company will dominate AI, despite the intense competition among OpenAI, Anthropic, and other industry leaders.

“I think the world will demand — this is going to be such critical infrastructure for so many things that the world will rightly demand robustness in the system of multiple providers,” Altman said. “I think it’s a very good thing.”

Anthropic’s IPO looks like a test of how investors think about the AI market, according to Nate Elliott, a principal analyst at EMARKETER, a Business Insider sister company.

Elliott argued that Claude is “simply not competitive in consumer AI,” trailing far behind ChatGPT and Gemini in projected US users.

However, he sees a different opportunity in the workplace.

More than 60% of US AI users say they use the technology for work, and Elliott said Claude is “poised to win enterprise AI.”

“How the markets value that will make or break Anthropic’s IPO,” he added.

Investors are focusing on what comes next for Anthropic and its peers, Sonali Basak, the chief investment strategist at iCapital, told CNBC.

One key question, she said, is whether public markets will embrace AI companies that continue to consume huge amounts of capital.

“How comfortable will investors be with this generation of tech giants that burn this much money and that are not free cash flow giants, as we’ve seen of the Magnificent Seven?” Basak told the network.

Beyond the IPOs, Basak pointed to a bigger debate over AI economics. Investors are closely watching whether the industry’s usage-based pricing model proves durable as enterprise customers seek greater pricing certainty.

Even so, excitement around the deals remains strong. The upcoming IPOs are “seen as one of those Facebook-type moments, Amazon-type moments,” Basak said, reflecting investors’ hopes of getting early access to the next generation of technology leaders.