Ahead of IPO, Anthropic’s Daniela Amodei shrugs off doubts about AI returns

Private investors have been vying to get a piece of Anthropologie, as the AI ​​model maker grows at a dizzying pace. Multiple investors told TechCrunch that the company’s $65 billion fundraising at a $965 billion valuation, announced last week, was heavily oversubscribed. Now, with private demand still strong, Anthropic has revealed that it is taking steps toward a public listing by confidentially filing for an initial public offering.

Co-founder Daniela Amodei, speaking at the Bloomberg Technology Conference on Thursday, said the decision came down to capital. “It’s a really big upfront cost to train the models and provide inference,” she said. “I think that over time, the core group of companies that are developing the frontier will need access to capital, and I think the public market is well suited for that.”

Anthropology has been growing at an astonishing pace. The company announced annual revenues topped $47 billion in May, up significantly from about $9 billion at the end of 2025. However, that path faces a real test. Companies like Uber have said that while AI can generate returns, their AI spending has not proven to be entirely productive, raising the possibility that companies will begin to rein in those budgets and slow growth across the sector.

This doesn’t bother Amodei, who believes companies are still at an early stage in figuring out how to deploy AI effectively.

“I expect that today’s use cases will continue to be the primary driver of efficiency or innovation, whether it’s in programming, financial services, legal, or… [or] “Healthcare,” she said. “But as the business community becomes more familiar with the tools, we will all learn together. I hope that over time they will be more integrated into the everyday life of how humans do our work, and there will actually be a lot of value created.”

Amodei also addressed why Anthropic, unlike competitors OpenAI and Elon Musk’s xAI, has not built its own data centers to meet the company’s growing computing needs.

“Anthropic’s view has always been to want to plan for the best results but not overextend ourselves so that we buy more computers than we can use productively,” she said. “It’s really hard to predict that perfectly. We would much rather be on the side of having a little more demand for the product than we can deliver rather than the other way around.”

Last month, the company surprised the AI ​​industry by partnering with xAI for computing power, a deal later revealed in SpaceX’s S-1 filing to cost Anthropic $1.25 billion a month.