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Dario Amodei’s Anthropic IPO Faces a Test Beyond the A.I. Market

Anthropic is betting that A.I. adoption will accelerate fast enough to justify its enormous infrastructure commitments, but many businesses are still building the systems needed to deploy it responsibly.

Anthropic’s leaked IPO prospectus offers an unusually detailed look at the economics behind the A.I. race. The numbers are striking: roughly $518 billion in computing commitments over the next decade, with about 80 percent of that amount reportedly owed whether customers use the capacity or not. Anthropic says the commitments are necessary because compute, rather than demand, is the constraint on its growth. A second question interests me more. 

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While Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and his competitors race toward a public listing—and to secure the compute needed to build increasingly capable models—the customers they are all selling to are, for the most part, ill-prepared to deploy this technology at scale. Anthropic has laid out, in detail, what its models can do wrong. When one of them does make a mistake, the company that deployed it is the one that answers for the consequences. 

Managing that responsibility will require changes to how companies build and run software, who tests it and what they expect from their vendors. The filing is therefore both a document about Anthropic’s economics and a warning about the operational infrastructure its customers will need to build if the company’s growth assumptions are to hold. 

Two risks in Anthropic’s plan

Reuters puts Anthropic’s computing commitments at $518 billion over a decade, with about 80 percent owed whether customers use the capacity or not. That averages out to roughly $50 billion a year, against annualized revenue of about $46 billion at the latest quarter’s pace. The company is reportedly seeking a valuation above $2 trillion, based in part on its own forecast of $190 billion to $200 billion in revenue in 2028, about four times its current annualized pace. 

The valuation is in line with Palantir, SpaceX and Cloudflare, which trade at roughly 42 to 53 times this year’s expected........

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