Anthropic files papers to sell shares to the public for 1st time

AI company Anthropic has filed an initial public offering in what could become one of the biggest stock market debuts on Wall Street. The U.S.-based company behind the Claude chatbot disclosed steep losses, huge risks and explosive growth in revenue. CBC senior business reporter Philippe de Montigny is here to break it down for us. Okay, tell us a little bit more about this filing today. Right, so Anthropic filed this prospectus with the U.S. Securities Exchange Commission and that gives us a first look under the hood of the company it's still a private company for now but it wants to become a publicly traded company on the Nasdaq and this Wall Street debut could eclipse the SpaceX IPO back in June that raised a record 86 billion US dollars so the prospectus highlights Anthropic's growth take a look at this graph for revenue going from 41 million dollars in 2023 to $386 million in 2024 to $4.6 billion in 2025 and that $16.3 billion for 2026 is just for the first half of the year, six months only. So a huge growth in revenue. Now the company is also reporting staggering losses going from $1.5 billion in 2023 to all the way to $80 3.7 billion in the first half of 2026. Okay, so incredible to look at the numbers there, but we can't look at this and the prospect of this filing without also thinking about the highlights that is made there with the existential risks to humanity, discussions that a lot of people are having surrounding AI. Right. And those terms were actually in the prospectus of Anthropic today. So Anthropic recognizes that concerns have been raised by both, you know, within the company, but also outside with other researchers, policymakers. It says risks will increase as AI progress accelerates beyond our ability to evaluate and safeguard new models. Here's what the company's CEO had to say last month. But we understand that as AI models become more powerful, even more stringent standards of safety will be required. And we are always aiming to improve our safety and alignment practices, our ability to prevent misuse, and we are always striving to do better. We will slow down as much as necessary in order to make sure that every successive AI technology that we release is actually safe. Right. So those concerns are still very much out there, very much in the media. And now back in May, Anthropic was valued at nine hundred and sixty five billion dollars after raising sixty five billion from investors. This IPO would give the company access to a much larger pool of money to cost its to fund its costly ambitions. It didn't say how many shares it intends to sell, nor at what price. But as a frontrunner in this AI race, it will be a litmus test for investor appetite, and it could be a benchmark for how Wall Street values leading AI companies, including its rival OpenAI, which is behind ChatGPT. Will be very interesting to track. Thank you for this. That is CBC's business reporter, Philippe de Montigny.