Thirty seconds, and a little more. That is how long Dario Amodei, the chief executive of Anthropic, speaks in his company’s IPO roadshow video before he reaches the risk that artificial intelligence could help someone build a bioweapon. His is the first face the film shows. It was released on Tuesday, 10 November, it runs for 42 minutes, and it has one audience: Wall Street, which Anthropic hopes to persuade to buy into its public offering.
In a pitch like this, every word has been weighed. So Brent D. Griffiths of Business Insider counted them, or rather had machines do the counting. The publication gave a transcript of the video separately to ChatGPT and to Claude, Anthropic’s own model, and asked each to pick out the words and themes that came up most often. Something in that arrangement is worth pausing on. The product was asked to read its makers’ sales pitch and report what they kept saying.
The film
Amodei keeps to the script. He calls AI “the most promising technology in human history,” a technology that is “capturing the essence of cognition.” He presents safety as the lab’s first concern. Around him the video alternates between the brightly coloured graphics that now decorate most of Anthropic’s research and testimonials from big customers, Bristol Myers Squibb and Accenture among them.
Every power has its preferred register. A royal court speaks of lineage and providence. This company speaks of cognition and danger, often in the same breath, and asks for capital on the strength of both.
The word that comes first
Leave aside the mentions of “Claude” and “models,” which nobody would be surprised by, and the word at the top of the count is compute.
Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI, Anthropic’s chief rival, likes to say that compute is destiny. For Anthropic it is also the bill. Data centres and the chips that go in them cost enormous sums, and that expense is arguably the reason the company is going public at all. In its amended registration statement, as CNBC reported, Anthropic disclosed purchase commitments and leases with an aggregate committed spend of about $895.4 billion, “substantially all of which is related to compute and infrastructure.” Nearly half of it is due by the end of 2030. The same filing showed about $17 billion in revenue for the third quarter, alongside a quarterly net loss of $23.29 billion and a loss of $104 billion for the first nine months of the year, mostly the result of fair-value changes on convertible notes and derivative liabilities.
The cost of the machinery is rising faster than the money it brings in. An analysis on Investing.com puts compute and infrastructure expense at $9.86 billion in the third quarter, against $5.56 billion in the second and $3.39 billion in the first. That spending turned an operating profit in the second quarter into an operating loss in the third, even though revenue grew by more than $5 billion between the two. The company attributes most of the jump to $5.0 billion of compute bought on short-term commitments, which currently costs significantly more than capacity under its multi-year contracts. The same analysis cautions that the $895 billion is not money Anthropic has borrowed, and not a cheque it writes tomorrow.
Elsewhere in the prospectus, Anthropic has told investors that its chips are interchangeable. In the video, the chips simply come up again and again.
The word that comes second
Safety is the company’s founding creed, and it gets 27 mentions. That number leaves out passages like Amodei’s opening warning about bioweapons, which never uses the word. Counted by theme instead of by word, safety climbs higher. It still does not overtake compute.
The film is careful to say that the creed costs nothing. The narrator puts it this way:
“We’re finding safety doesn’t hold us back. In fact, it’s because we can trust Claude’s work that we can take its discoveries and apply them in the real world in ways that will benefit everyone.”
Here is a reflection, and only that. Institutions that sell restraint and growth together eventually have to explain why the restraint never slows the growth. The answer in this film is that restraint is what makes the growth possible. The prospectus underneath it is less serene. It has listed, among the risks to its results of operations, the end of humanity itself. The founders speak of a duty to warn, and the share offering is built around that warning.
The terms
The roadshow comes with numbers to match. According to an IPO tracker kept by Leverage Shares, the public S-1 appeared on the SEC’s EDGAR system on 26 October and was amended on 2 November, adding the third-quarter results and the commitment figure, and again on 10 November, setting a price range of $70 to $78 for 825 million Class A shares. They are to trade on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the symbol ANT. No pricing date or first day of trading has been announced. Both wait on the Securities and Exchange Commission declaring the registration effective.
Until then, investors have the filing, and they have the 42-minute film, which opens with its chief executive warning about bioweapons and returns to compute more often than to anything else.