Anthropic walks tightrope to Nasdaq, pushing for a slowdown while pursuing $2 trillion valuation — SkimNews
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- Anthropic has chosen Nasdaq for its potential IPO, CNBC confirmed after Business Insider first reported the exchange selection, with the company having confidentially filed its prospectus in June.
- Anthropic is widely expected to list as soon as next month and could seek a $2 trillion valuation, up from a $965 billion private valuation earlier this year.
- Dario Amodei published an essay proposing a three-step slowdown: third-party model evaluators, common safety standards among frontier companies, and coordination with authoritarian governments.
- Sam Altman endorsed Amodei's slowdown proposal but told Fortune 'right now would be an ill-advised moment to go public,' with OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar targeting a 2027 listing.
- Anthropic hit $65 billion in annualized revenue in July — roughly a sevenfold year-over-year increase — and told shareholders it will post a second consecutive quarter of operating profit.
- D.A. Davidson's Gil Luria and Gartner's Arun Chandrasekaran argued stricter safety standards would favor Anthropic and OpenAI by pricing out smaller competitors, with Luria calling the strategy 'monopolistic' and a 'ladder pull.'
- A CNBC Generation Lab survey found more than 75% of 18- to 34-year-olds don't trust Amodei to act responsibly, and roughly 70% feel the same about Altman.
Why it matters: Anthropic's $65B annualized revenue — up roughly 7x year-over-year — and potential $2T valuation give it the resources to absorb compliance costs that common safety standards would impose, meaning Amodei's slowdown push could function as a moat that locks out smaller AI labs unable to afford third-party evaluators and frontier-level safety infrastructure.
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