Anthropic’s impending IPO has unsurprisingly drawn potential investors’ attention to the US startup’s financial health. Since Anthropic has invested heavily in expanding its computing infrastructure and training its artificial intelligence models, the question of returns has piqued the interest of many. On an operational level, the company said it will be profitable by the end of the quarter.
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according to financial timesthe startup told a small group of investors that this quarter will be the second in a row that it reports an adjusted operating profit rather than a loss. This value does not take into account many expenses, such as payments to employees in stock. People familiar with the matter said that after excluding fees paid to cloud giants and other partners and the cost of training artificial intelligence models, Anthropic’s profit margin has exceeded 80%.
Anthropic is preparing for an initial public offering on the U.S. Nasdaq exchange and was due to distribute a prospectus to investors last week. Instead, the company shared the documents with a limited number of investors and said it was willing to answer their questions before making the information more widely public. Investors may have questions about the potential impact of the latest security measures on the pace of artificial intelligence development and Anthropic’s business model as it relates to public markets.
In the second quarter, the startup has achieved adjusted operating profit, with revenue increasing 14-fold year over year to $11.5 billion. The company’s annual revenue from this form reached $65 billion as of the end of July, although it had not topped $9 billion at the end of last year. Analysts say that if Anthropic continues to operate at these profit margins and revenue growth rates, competitors will have little chance of catching up. They estimate Anthropic will post adjusted revenue of $120 billion this year and nearly triple that number by the end of next year. Through the initial public offering, the company expects to increase its capital to $2 trillion.
In this sense, Anthropic management’s call to proactively slow down the development of artificial intelligence is not entirely timely, because this move will inevitably reduce the growth rate of the startup’s financial performance. Sam Altman, the head of rival OpenAI, even said that this year is not suitable for the company’s IPO due to the security situation of artificial intelligence. Consultations between competing companies on developing common security rules are already underway at the expert level, prompting relevant public statements from the management of OpenAI and Anthropic.
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