Investors will have to get comfortable with a public Anthropic (ANTH.PVT) spending billions of dollars to support its AI vision.
There is a precedent for this in tech: Amazon (AMZN), which moved from bookstore to cloud computing powerhouse and online shopping behemoth.
“It [Anthropic’s IPO’s] reminds me of a kind of a couple of things. I got to work with Jeff Bezos for a long period of time. And he always said, ‘We’re willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time,'” Kleiner Perkins partner and Electronic Arts co-founder Bing Gordon said on Sozzi Unleashed. Gordon was also an early board member at Amazon.
“I was in the boardroom when we kept having to approve capex for AWS, kind of no profit in the short term. A lot of capex,” Gordon added. “And there was one year where we said, oh my God, it’s $75 billion in capex. That would be like the top 10th country in the world … The board was freaked out early on when we weren’t showing free cash flow. We were investing in the future. And it is kind of like the Anthropic story. Invest in the future. The market is usually pretty bad at figuring out the three- or four-year-out returns. And so this is the bet that the capex is going to pay off in that three- or four-year period, as it did with AWS.”
Anthropic’s first-half 2026 revenue surged to $16.3 billion compared to $1.1 billion a year ago, the prospectus shows.
However, the filing also discloses an $80.7 billion first-half net loss and a strong signal in aggressive AI spending in the years ahead.
Investment bankers are reportedly aiming for an astronomical listing valuation at close to $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion.
Anthropic could debut on public markets before the end of November.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has to work hard to convince investors that the spending will be worth it, much like what Bezos did.
“Jeff always asks the best questions and piercing questions. And at some point, you know, you either trust your CEO or you don’t,” Gordon said. “And at that point, you know, we had a discussion. He’s got a principle, which is disagree and commit. But he also listens to every bit of feedback. But at the end, we believed that AWS was going to be a cash-generating machine and would continue to grow.”
Follow Brian Sozzi on X @BrianSozzi, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Tips on stories? Email him at brian.sozzi@yahoofinance.com.
