Ian Verender

I'm Carrington Clark.

And I'm the ABC's Chief Business Correspondent, Ian Verinder.

No, and the incredible amount of money they're going to be spending as well, which seems to be driving Wall Street's incredible drive to just buy more of them.

Wall Street just keeps hitting new records each day.

Most companies get to a point where private funding becomes problematic.

And so either you've got to have a very rich backer or banks that are willing to lend you vast amounts of money.

The money has to come from somewhere.

And if you're not really generating the profits that you need to, and bear in mind, Anthropic is a relatively new company, the obvious way to go is to list on the stock exchange.

We used to call it float, a float on the stock exchange back in the old days, but it's now called an IPO, an initial public offering.

But essentially, it's a way to sell your company to the public and for them to provide cash for that company.

Now, one of the, I guess, key questions in all of this is where does the money go?

So a lot of the times you'll have an established private company that is a big money spinner and the founders just want to get out, you know, and you've seen a big chemist in Australia float not so long ago, a chemist warehouse.

And that was essentially the owners there were trying to sell that operation to a major player for many years, couldn't get the price they wanted.

They went to the public market and they sold that way.

So it was a way for them to cash out.

for them to take money off the table and walk away.

So that's one... Rationale.

Yeah, for doing it.

The other one is that you need money to pour into the business.

And so you're getting investors from outside to pour money into the business rather than into your own pocket.