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

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Anthropic co-founder and president Daniela Amodei confirmed at the Bloomberg Tech conference that the company has taken steps toward a public listing through a confidential IPO filing. The timing follows a $65 billion fundraise at a $965 billion valuation announced the prior week, which was reportedly greatly oversubscribed by private investors. Revenue acceleration has been steep: annualized revenue crossed $47 billion in May 2026 from roughly $9 billion at year-end 2025. Amodei framed the IPO as a capital access play — frontier model training and inference require massive upfront investment, and public markets provide a durable funding mechanism at scale. She addressed skepticism about AI returns (notably from companies like Uber), arguing enterprises are still early in deploying AI effectively, with coding, finance, legal, and healthcare as primary drivers. On infrastructure, Anthropic is maintaining its asset-light compute strategy rather than building data centers, preferring demand to slightly exceed supply over risk of over-provisioning. The company recently struck a compute deal with xAI disclosed at $1.25 billion per month — a sign of the infrastructure spend required at this scale.