New York Times profiles Anthropic CEO as giant IPO nears

Anthropic is heading toward what could be the largest stock market debut ever. On Thursday, November 5, The New York Times ↘ 0.92% published a profile of chief executive Dario Amodei, describing the Claude developer as "poised for one of the largest public offerings in the world this month." The profile draws on interviews with more than two dozen of his peers, mentors and associates. It traces the 43-year-old's views on AI back to his time as a Princeton physics doctoral student, when he read Ray Kurzweil's "The Singularity Is Near" and followed online forums about AI risk and effective giving.nytimes.com

The road to a Nasdaq debut

Anthropic publicly filed its S-1 registration statement on October 26 and plans to list its Class A shares on the Nasdaq Global Select Market ↗ 2.55% under the ticker "ANT." On November 2 it filed an amended version that added third-quarter results. Under SEC rules, the investor roadshow could start the week of November 9 and trading could begin as soon as the week of November 16, MarketWatch reported. The company has not yet set a date, a price range or the number of shares it will sell.anthropic.com+2

According to AP, the offering could raise as much as $100 billion, above the record $86 billion SpaceX raised in June, and could value Anthropic at $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion. Revenue in the first half of 2026 was $16.3 billion, up from $1.2 billion a year earlier, TechCrunch reported. Over the same period the company posted a net loss of $80.7 billion, which included a one-time accounting charge of $72.4 billion. The filing also gives the seven co-founders 50.1% of shareholder votes, and its list of risk factors runs to nearly 100 pages.techcrunch.com+1

Investors weigh in

In South Africa, the Financial Mail asked four investment professionals whether local investors should buy into the listing, which it called potentially the "biggest stock market debut in history." Caixin described the IPO as a test of AI's growth story against its costs.fm.co.za+1

The founders on safety

The siblings have also been talking publicly about how they think about AI. In an interview on Walter Isaacson's podcast "The Builders," Dario and Daniela Amodei explained that Claude is trained to reason from principles rather than follow rules. They also discussed interpretability research and the company's refusal to supply AI for autonomous weapons. Dario recalled his reaction to GPT-2 while he was at OpenAI: "My god, you just scale this thing up another factor of a million and it'll be better than humans at everything."finance.biggo.com

The Times profile summarizes the split view of Amodei as he prepares to take the company public: "Some call him a doomer. Others see him as a responsible technologist," the paper wrote.nytimes.com