Anthropic CEO pitches safety, culture ahead of IPO

Anthropic PBC chief executive officer Dario Amodei on Friday pitched investors on safety and a strict hiring culture, days before the artificial intelligence (AI) company’s stock market debut.

“We’re very paranoid” about AI safety, Amodei told JPMorgan Chase & Co chief executive officer Jamie Dimon at an event hosted by the bank, one of the offering’s lead underwriters.

Focus had shaped Anthropic’s culture and its strategy, steering it toward business customers and coding tools rather than consumer chatbots, he said, a path not initially chosen by the company’s archrival, ChatGPT-maker OpenAI.

Anthropic cofounder and CEO Dario Amodei looks on as he takes part in a session during the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Jan. 23 last year.

Photo: AFP

“We deliberately chose enterprise as a focus, because we understood that it was synergistic with our focus on safety,” he said.

The listing comes at a sensitive moment for the AI boom. AI stocks have swung sharply as investors question whether heavy spending on the technology would pay off.

Nvidia Corp, the chip giant at the center of the AI buildout and an Anthropic investor, has been rocked by the resignation of chief executive officer Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) after he admitted to an affair with a woman US intelligence reportedly believes was a Chinese spy.

Anthropic set a price range last week of US$70 to US$78 per share, with the stock, under the ticker name “ANT,” expected to begin trading on Thursday.

At the top of that range, the offering would raise up to US$64.4 billion and value the company at about US$1.4 trillion, including employee stock options and restricted shares. That is well below the US$2 trillion figure floated earlier in the year.

Amodei, who cofounded Anthropic in 2021 after leaving OpenAI, told investors the company would keep opening new markets by pushing the limits of its technology.

“AI isn’t just one application; it isn’t just one market,” he said. “You’re on an exponential of cognition, and as the exponential proceeds, new markets become possible.”

Fields such as scientific research would be “much larger than coding, in the same way that coding was much larger than chatbots,” he said.

Yet “Anthropic tends to under promise and over deliver. We’re not going to go out and say we’re going to solve this problem and that problem and that problem,” he added.

Amodei said he spends “probably 40-50 percent” of his time on talent and culture, which he called “the most important things.”

Every hire goes through a culture interview, and the company has turned down technically gifted candidates who did not fit, he said.

“We don’t want people who are jerks. We don’t want people who try to steal the show and don’t work well with others,” he said. “We don’t want people who aren’t oriented towards the public benefit.”