Anthropic Chief Executive Dario Amodei said that when it comes to the artificial-intelligence giant's planned initial public offering, he hopes the company will "underpromise and overdeliver."
Amodei made the comments while speaking Friday in a livestreamed fireside chat with JPMorgan Chase Chief Executive Jamie Dimon at the bank's Manhattan headquarters. The audience included existing and prospective Anthropic investors as well as Anthropic Chief Financial Officer Krishna Rao and Amodei's wife, Cami Clark.
The maker of the popular Claude chatbot is targeting a valuation of roughly $1.33 trillion or more, and its shares are expected to begin trading Thursday. JPMorgan is one of the more than 20 underwriters on the deal. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are leading the offering.
It has been a wild ride for Anthropic, which launched its IPO into a volatile market. AI-related stocks collapsed earlier this month, prompting the Nasdaq composite to lose $2.5 trillion in a single day, as investors questioned whether lofty return expectations will come to fruition. Stocks recovered some since, but the shocking exit of former Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang this week following his affair with a suspected Chinese spy hit shares in Nvidia and caused more investor angst.
Nvidia is both a supplier of chips to Anthropic and is set, along with other tech giants, to take a large stake in the company alongside the IPO.
"We're not super fussed on when exactly, what month, what market conditions we go public into," Amodei told Dimon.
As recently as a few months ago, Wall Street expected the offering to value Anthropic at as high as $2 trillion. Those expectations dropped to around $1.5 trillion more recently and then below that following the market selloff earlier this month, which prompted some large investors to push Anthropic to lower the targeted valuation.
Amodei suggested that the company is conservatively pricing its offering, telling Dimon that throughout the process, he has gotten varying versions of advice to "never let your company be worth a single dollar more than it's really worth."
Anthropic said earlier this week that it plans to sell 825 million shares at a price range of $70 to $78 a share. The price range or offering size is likely to be increased after strong investor demand so far for its shares, according to people familiar with the matter.
That puts the company on track to raise over $61 billion at the midpoint of its current target range, plus a $26 billion private placement from big investors including Google.
Anthropic could top the size of SpaceX's record-breaking June offering if it raises more than $75 billion. (Dimon also hosted a fireside chat with Elon Musk ahead of SpaceX's IPO.)
Amodei also addressed Anthropic's lofty goals, including to find cures to diseases.
"It sounds starry eyed, it sounds crazy," he said. "I really do believe it can be done."
Amodei called investing in computing power the "deepest business dilemma that the company faces," given the massive investment required.
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