OpenAI rival Anthropic plans to go public

Anthropic, the AI firm and rival of ChatGPT developer OpenAI, may soon become a publicly traded company, allowing people to buy shares in it. The company said on Monday it had confidentially submitted a draft registration statement for an initial public offering to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). This means that business information will remain under wraps for now,while the documents are being reviewed by the regulator. The IPO could be one of the three largest this year. The AI firm recently completed a $65 billion funding round at a total valuation of $900 billion. OpenAI is also rumoured to have IPO ambitions that could be on a similar scale. Elon Musk’s space firm SpaceX, which has now also absorbed his AI firm xAI, could go public as early as mid-June. According to media reports, the aim is to achieve a total valuation of up to $1.8trillion. With expected proceeds of up to $80 billion, it would be by far the largest IPO. At the same time, questions remain over whether the hundreds of billions of dollars being invested in artificial intelligence infrastructure can ultimately generate sufficient returns.