Anthropic has no immediate plans to go public, comms chief says

Catch up quick: The Financial Times reported that Anthropic has hired lawyers for a potential IPO as soon as next year.

• The FT also reported the company is in discussions for a private funding round that could value the company at over $300 billion.

What they're saying: "Right now, we're keeping our options open. There are no immediate plans to go public," de Marigny told Axios' Eleanor Hawkins.

• She explained that "AI development is moving so rapidly it has eclipsed our ability to keep up with understanding it," and now there are entire fields of research dedicated to understanding why the large language models act in unexpected ways.
• "But if you want to be a well-run company that is serving enterprises ... there's an element of rigor and discipline that we are going to have to get into, to be able to be a stable company," de Marigny said.
• "We want to get into the rhythm of it so that we are acting with the discipline that our enterprise customers deserve."

The big picture: AI optimism is already driving stock markets, and investors will be eager to pile in when the first major AI company goes public.

• While Wall Street has boomed along with AI hype, the lofty valuations have raised questions about a potential bubble as investors increasingly scrutinize how much Big Tech companies are spending on their AI ambitions.

• Shares of publicly traded Big Tech companies like Meta, Google, Nvidia and others have seen volatility following executive commentary and figures gleaned from earnings reports.
• An IPO would let AI companies tap public market funding, but also expose them to that scrutiny.

What to watch: Anthropic has been vocal about regulation, endorsing a major AI bill in California. De Marigny said the company is in favor of regulation that promotes transparency.

• "The frontier AI developers need to basically put nutrition labels on the models that they're deploying to the public, to billions of people every day so that they know what it's capable of, because we're only in the very early innings of seeing what that is," she said.