Full Episode
Anthropic beats OpenAI to this one major milestone. This is Motley Fool Money. Tyler Crowe Welcome to Motley Fool Money! My name is Tyler Crowe. Today, I'm joined by longtime Fool contributors Matt Frankel and John Quast. Today, we're going to cover our typical smattering of topics. We're going to go looking at the buy now, pay later space because of some recent news from Klarna.
We're going to do our typical Thursday stocks on our radar. But first, we're going to start with news coming out of Anthropic. OpenAI's chief competitor, Anthropic, has recently hired lawyers and has been in contact with investment bankers about an IPO that could occur as soon as 2026. It could end up being the largest IPO ever or at least in the top five.
Now, there's been a lot of hype for AI-related IPOs this past year in 2025. We've seen companies like CoreWeave go for almost $100 billion, or at least what they were looking for.
We've seen companies like Fermi, a lot of pre-revenue companies in the AI kind of picks and shovel space going for massive valuations, even though they really haven't done anything yet other than put a plan on paper, and we're getting these very ambitious valuations. Matt, I have to assume that with this IPO Anthropic's looking at, they're looking for a big payout here, right?
Yeah, I love the word you used, ambitious valuations. Anthropic is having success getting money in the private markets. In my opinion, they would be wanting to step it up a bit. Right now, they're valued at about $350 billion, reportedly. in an ongoing funding round to which Microsoft and Nvidia have already committed $15 billion. It's not like they can't raise money privately.
This is up from $183 billion valuations, almost double, in a September funding round. It really shows you the magnitude of hype surrounding these big AI players. It's not as if Anthropic is a pre-revenue business. It's making money. It expects to end this year with $9 billion in annual recurring revenue. Management's projecting that to rise to over $20 billion next year.
They have a pretty ambitious target of $70 billion for 2028. But it all depends, really, on the rapid growth in AI spending. My real thought is, if the IPO market and the AI market are doing what they're doing now, then 2026 is a good target, even toward the first half. If the market cools, this could be delayed significantly.
It's going to depend on what they think they can get out of the market. But as it stands now, it's not surprising to see a sense of urgency develop.
I want to point out that the CEO of Anthropic recently said some AI giants are taking reckless hundreds of billions, spending risks on data centers and chips. He didn't name names, but I think that we're all knowing who he's talking about, his former employer, OpenAI. These companies are spending a ton of money.
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