Anthropic has reportedly selected Nasdaq as the venue for its planned initial public offering and has told a small group of investors it expects positive adjusted operating income for a second straight quarter.
Nasdaq Wins Another Major AI Listing
Anthropic is targeting an October listing on Nasdaq, Business Insider reported on Sunday, citing a person familiar with the matter.
A listing there would also make the company eligible for inclusion in the Nasdaq 100 Index.
The IPO could value Anthropic at $2 trillion or more, surpassing the $1.75 trillion valuation of Elon Musk's Space Exploration Technologies Corp.'s (NASDAQ: SPCX) listing in June.
Its Series H funding round in May valued the company at $965 billion, though secondary-market transactions have reportedly pushed its implied valuation higher since, with estimates currently ranging from roughly $1.05 trillion to $1.5 trillion.
Strong Margins And Surging Revenue
The Claude maker expects positive adjusted operating income for a second consecutive quarter, with gross margins above 80% before accounting for revenue shared with distribution partners like Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) and the cost of training its models, according to a Financial Times report from Sunday.
Amazon is Anthropic's largest cumulative investor, with a stake of roughly $8 billion, and AWS serves as the company's primary training cloud.
Rather than releasing its IPO prospectus publicly last week as expected, the company shared documents with a small group of investors first, fielding their questions before making the filing public, the FT report added, citing people familiar with the matter.
The company's revenue rose roughly 14-fold year over year in the second quarter to $11.5 billion, with annualized revenue reaching $65 billion by the end of July, up from $9 billion at the end of last year.
Investors are forecasting Anthropic will end the year with $120 billion in annualized revenue and close 2027 with nearly triple that figure, FT said, citing Joey Brookhart, an analyst covering AI labs at SemiAnalysis.
Anthropic did not immediately respond to Benzinga's request for comment on the Nasdaq IPO plans and its reported financial results.
The Listing Comes Amid Broader AI Safety Concerns
The company's CEO Dario Amodei called on the industry to "pace the frontier," a position echoed by OpenAI's Sam Altman, who said the ChatGPT maker will remain private this year because of AI safety concerns.
According to Benzinga edge rankings, Amazon's stock has a Momentum score in the 67th percentile and a Growth score in the 93rd percentile.