Anthropic beats OpenAI to confidential IPO filing as rivalry shapes AI's future

Ahead of its IPO, Anthropic's Daniela Amodei shrugs off doubts about AI's returns

Private investors have been falling over themselves to get a piece of Anthropic, given the AI model maker is growing at a dizzying pace. Multiple investors told TechCrunch that the company's $65 billion fundraise at a $965 billion valuation, announced last week, was greatly oversubscribed. Now, with that private demand still strong, Anthropic has revealed that it's taking steps towards a public listing by filing confidentially for an IPO. Co-founder Daniela Amodei, speaking at the Bloomberg Tech conference on Thursday, said the decision comes down to capital. "It's a really big upfront cost to train the models and to serve inference on them," she said. "My guess is that over time, the sort of core set of companies that are working to advance the frontier are just going to need access to capital, and I think the public market is very well suited to that." Anthropic has been growing at a breakneck pace. The company announced that annualized revenue crossed $47 billion in May, up dramatically from roughly $9 billion at the end of 2025. That trajectory faces a real test, though. Companies such as Uber have said that while AI can deliver returns, not all of their AI spending has proven productive, raising the prospect that corporations could begin to rein those budgets and slow growth across the sector. That isn't fazing Amodei, who believes businesses are still early in figuring out how to deploy AI effectively. "The use cases today, I expect will continue to be the primary driver of efficiency or creativity, whether that's coding, financial services, legal, [or] health care," she said. "But as the business community gets more familiar with the tools, we're all going to learn together. My hope is that over time it'll be more incorporated into the day-to-day of how humans do our work, and there will actually be a lot more value realized." Amodei also addressed why, unlike rivals like OpenAI and Elon Musk's xAI, Anthropic isn't building its own data centers to meet the company's growing compute needs. "Anthropic's view has always been wanting to plan for the best outcome but not overextend ourselves such that we're buying more compute than we could productively use," she said. "It's really hard to predict that perfectly. We would much prefer to be on the side of having a little bit more demand for the product than we're able to serve than the inverse." Last month, the company surprised the AI industry by partnering with xAI for compute capacity, a deal later disclosed in SpaceX's S-1 filing to cost Anthropic $1.25 billion per month.

Anthropic v. OpenAI: Behind the bitter battle for the future of AI

SAN FRANCISCO/NEW YORK, June 11 (Reuters) - If not for the intense rivalry between Anthropic and OpenAI, the generative AI boom might not have arrived so quickly. In late 2022, OpenAI caught wind that Anthropic was working on an AI-powered chatbot. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman immediately directed employees to fast-track a competing product, four people familiar with the matter said. Two weeks later, the company released ChatGPT, sparking a technological revolution that promises to overhaul the global economy and the way humans interact. The same urgency now extends to plans for their blockbuster IPOs. The companies are racing to beat one another to market, viewing a first listing as a way to frame how investors will value the companies and establish their CEO as the leading voice of AI. As recently as May, many advisers expected OpenAI would be first to take the initial steps to go public. OpenAI has told some investors it was targeting an IPO as early as September, two people familiar with the matter said. But Anthropic jumped in first, announcing on June 1 it had made a confidential filing with U.S. regulators. OpenAI followed on Monday, a week later. The stakes extend beyond the clash between Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, a former researcher at OpenAI, where he was one of the people responsible for the core technology that made ChatGPT possible. The competition is spilling into Wall Street. It's rare for two such big direct rivals to raise capital at the same time, and the IPOs will be so big that they are by necessity turning to some of the same banks for help. OpenAI is looking to go public at a valuation around $1 trillion, Reuters previously reported. Bankers and other advisers are navigating increasingly complex relationships with both OpenAI and Anthropic, three people familiar with the matter said. Executives at both companies have pressed their IPO advisers for insight into the rival's plans, the people said, prompting some banks working with both companies to erect internal barriers between ⁠deal teams to prevent information leaks. 'ALL-OUT WAR' Top bosses often clash. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have traded public barbs as part of their space race, and Bill Gates and Steve Jobs quarreled over whether Microsoft (MSFT.O), opens new tab products had copied from Apple (AAPL.O), opens new tab . The tension between Altman and Amodei is the driving force in today's biggest technological revolution - influencing how quickly AI tools are released, what features they include and, ultimately, how people interact with the technology in their daily lives. "It's all-out war between these guys," said Anastasios Angelopoulos, CEO of Arena, a top AI benchmarking and evaluation company. "Every time there's a new release from Anthropic, the bet will be that OpenAI is soon to follow and vice versa." Both companies declined to comment on the CEO rivalry. FIGHT OVER REVENUE RECOGNITION The companies are also at odds over how each tells its financial story to investors. OpenAI has told investors and employees that Anthropic's preferred accounting method overstates its revenue by billions of dollars, according to two people familiar with the matter. In April, OpenAI's chief revenue officer Denise Dresser told employees that OpenAI considers Anthropic's financials inflated, according to a company memo reviewed by Reuters. That's because Anthropic books the full amount that customers pay for its AI services as revenue, but part of that sum is later routed to partners such as Amazon (AMZN.O), opens new tab and Google (GOOGL.O), opens new tab. OpenAI uses a different method, reporting only net revenue after paying its partner, Microsoft. Anthropic told Reuters that it follows established accounting practices and recognizes gross revenue because it is the "principal" in the transaction while its cloud partners are distribution channels. Dresser's internal communications aimed to reassure OpenAI staffers who have been demoralized by Anthropic's rapid growth, two of the people Reuters spoke to said. One reason for "Anthropic to try to beat OpenAI out to the public market is that they will get to set the agenda for how a frontier model reports financials and do so in a way that is favorable to their financial model," said Gil Luria, analyst at D. A. Davidson. The desire to best its rival has, at times, led to tensions within OpenAI. Altman recently ⁠clashed with Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar over whether the company could meet the obligations required for a public listing on such a compressed timeline, three people familiar with the matter said. Altman told her to figure it out or hire different bankers and lawyers who could pull it off, they said. Friar has since told advisers that the company's leadership is aligned on timing, another person said. In an interview on CNBC after Anthropic's filing, Altman said he didn't want to rush OpenAI's debut. A LONG-RUNNING FEUD The rivalry dates back to late 2020, when Amodei left his job as OpenAI's vice president of research with several others to create Anthropic, which promised to prioritize safety. The move was seen by many OpenAI employees as a rebuke of Altman's approach. In early 2022, Anthropic trained the first version of its chatbot Claude, but held it back from public deployment to conduct safety research, opens new tab instead, Anthropic later said. OpenAI had similar projects underway. Some employees were working on a "super-assistant" tool powered by OpenAI's then-advanced models, four people familiar with the matter said. Meanwhile, co-founder John Schulman was separately working on a chat interface. Schulman ⁠didn't respond to a request for comment. At one point, OpenAI officials considered launching the chat-based assistant tool in March 2023, alongside the release of its GPT-4 large language model, the four people said. But rumors of Anthropic's project in mid-November galvanized Altman. He directed OpenAI staffers to develop a chatbot that could be ready as quickly as possible. "All of a sudden, it was like, we got to ship this in two weeks," one of the people said. The product, ChatGPT, was released on November 30, 2022. It quickly became the fastest-growing consumer application in history, drawing millions of users and upending tech giants' previous product roadmaps. Anthropic, which launched, opens new tab its Claude chatbot a few months later, spent about three years catching up to OpenAI. Around late 2024, Amodei redirected ⁠researchers to focus on so-called reasoning models after seeing OpenAI's early success there, three people familiar with the matter said. The dynamic flipped in late 2025 when Anthropic, which long focused on business customers, released a powerful update to its Claude Code tool. OpenAI, which generates much of its revenue from consumers paying for ChatGPT, has now redoubled its focus on enterprise software and pulled more resources into its own coding product, Codex. OPEN DISTASTE Relations between the two companies deteriorated after Altman was unexpectedly fired by OpenAI's board in late 2023. As the board cast about for options, directors briefly spoke with Amodei about merging the two labs under his leadership. In a recent deposition, one former OpenAI executive ⁠said the idea was considered "extremely briefly" before the board moved on to other ideas. Even so, news of the proposal infuriated many OpenAI employees, three people familiar with the events said. Altman was reinstated within days, but that anger persisted. The feud is becoming increasingly public. In February, Altman slammed Anthropic's Super Bowl ads as "deceptive" for misrepresenting OpenAI's plans to sell ads on ChatGPT. In March, Amodei accused Altman of leveraging Anthropic's dispute with the Pentagon to help OpenAI. At an AI summit in India in February, Prime Minister Narendra Modi encouraged all the tech executives on stage to join hands in a show of unity. In a moment captured in a viral video, opens new tab from the summit, Altman and Amodei, standing next to one another, refused. Additional reporting by Milana Vinn, Kenrick Cai and Jeffrey Dastin. Editing by Sayantani Ghosh, Ken Li and Claudia Parsons Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab * Suggested Topics: * Artificial Intelligence * Capital Markets Echo Wang Thomson Reuters Echo Wang is a correspondent at Reuters covering U.S. equity capital markets, and the intersection of Chinese business in the U.S, breaking news from U.S. crackdown on TikTok and Grindr, to restrictions Chinese companies face in listing in New York. She was the Reuters' Reporter of the Year in 2020.

OpenAI and Anthropic warn of AI risks while racing to IPO

OpenAI and Anthropic have spent the past two weeks publishing papers warning that frontier AI is advancing faster than regulation can keep up. In the same stretch, both released their most powerful models yet, offered free developer tools to drive adoption, and filed confidential S-1 paperwork to go public. In the past fortnight, the two most powerful AI labs on the planet have published research papers, blog posts, and policy proposals warning that frontier artificial intelligence is advancing faster than anyone can control it. In the very same stretch, both filed confidential paperwork to go public. The tension is hard to miss. OpenAI and Anthropic are simultaneously sounding the alarm on the dangers of rapid AI development and stoking the fire with new model launches, free usage promotions, and IPO filings that would turn them into publicly traded companies under pressure to grow even faster. The warnings Last week, Anthropic published a paper titled "When AI builds itself," calling for a coordinated "slowdown or pause" in frontier model development across countries. The paper, authored by Marina Favaro and Jack Clark, argued that AI systems are approaching recursive self-improvement, a point at which humans lose meaningful oversight of the development process. "Without a global coordination mechanism, companies and governments will have to make difficult decisions about safety while under competitive and geopolitical pressures," Anthropic wrote. The company disclosed that as of May 2026, more than 80% of code merged into its own codebase was written by Claude, its AI model, not by human engineers. On Wednesday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published a blog post titled "Policy on the AI Exponential," arguing that AI is moving at a "lightning pace" while policy is "moving very slowly." He called for binding regulation, writing that "the risks are clearly here" and that transparency alone is no longer enough. OpenAI struck a similar chord. On Monday, CEO Sam Altman and chief scientist Jakub Pachocki published a blog post titled "Built to benefit everyone: our plan," proposing an "international organisation that helps coordinate leading AI efforts to reduce catastrophic risk." The pair said this body should have the power to slow frontier AI development so that "societal resilience, safety, and alignment can keep pace." The two companies are not alone in their concern. A White House internal fight over who gets to regulate AI has stalled federal policy, leaving a vacuum that neither lab seems willing to wait for Washington to fill. The acceleration But the warnings sit awkwardly alongside what both companies have actually been doing. On Tuesday, Anthropic released Claude Fable 5, a "Mythos-class" model that the company described as its most capable ever made publicly available. It is state-of-the-art on nearly all tested benchmarks, excelling in software engineering, knowledge work, vision, and scientific research. The model includes guardrails that route sensitive cybersecurity and distillation requests to a less capable model, Claude Opus 4.8. Anthropic said the safeguards trigger in fewer than 5% of sessions. Representatives for the company did not respond to requests for comment on the apparent tension between its risk warnings and model launches. OpenAI released GPT-5.5 in late April, calling it the "smartest and most intuitive" model it has ever built. The model set new benchmarks in agentic coding, computer use, and knowledge work. Representatives for OpenAI did not respond to requests for comment. Both labs are also encouraging rapid adoption through free usage perks. Anthropic raised Claude Code weekly limits by 50% through mid-July for paid subscribers, while OpenAI offered enterprise customers two months of free Codex access. The moves are designed to lock developers into each company's ecosystem ahead of what both expect to be a decisive year for AI tooling. The IPOs Perhaps the starkest illustration of the contradiction is the IPO race. Anthropic confidentially submitted its S-1 registration statement to the SEC on 1 June, roughly a week after closing a $65 billion Series H round that valued the company at reportedly $965 billion. OpenAI followed suit on 8 June, filing its own confidential S-1 with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley as lead underwriters. The company's last private round valued it at reportedly $852 billion, with analysts suggesting a public listing could push the valuation past $1 trillion. Going public would subject both companies to quarterly earnings pressure, a force that historically pushes technology firms toward growth at any cost. It is difficult to reconcile calls for a coordinated global slowdown in AI development with the mechanics of a publicly traded company expected to ship new products and hit revenue targets every three months. The irony is the point There is, of course, a charitable reading. Both labs may genuinely believe the risks are real and may be using their policy papers to advocate for guardrails that would apply equally to competitors. In that framing, the warnings are not hypocrisy but strategy: build fast, warn loudly, and hope regulation arrives before the technology outpaces it. But the less charitable reading is also plausible. Publishing safety research and calling for international coordination costs nothing. Filing for an IPO, launching frontier models, and handing out free developer tools is where the actual commitments lie. The policy papers may serve as reputational insurance, a way to say "we warned you" if things go wrong, without any obligation to slow down unilaterally. The truth likely sits somewhere in between. What is clear is that the gap between what these companies say and what they do is widening, and neither the market nor regulators seem to be demanding they close it.

Anthropic's Daniela Amodei Charts Leaner A.I. Strategy as IPO Race With OpenAI Heats

"The difference in our consumer product compared to competitors is that we're not an entertainment tool. It's really for productive activities, whether those are at work or at home," Amodei said. Days after Anthropic confidentially filed to go public, edging ahead of OpenAI in a closely watched IPO race among A.I. giants, Daniela Amodei, the company's co-founder and president, sought to draw a sharper distinction between the two rivals. Anthropic is currently valued at $965 billion, with expectations it could climb past $1 trillion on the public markets, compared with OpenAI's roughly $900 billion valuation. But as Amodei framed it, the competition is not just about numbers, but about how the technology itself is built and used. Sign Up For Our Daily Newsletter Sign Up Thank you for signing up! By clicking submit, you agree to our <a href="http://observermedia.com/terms">terms of service</a> and acknowledge we may use your information to send you emails, product samples, and promotions on this website and other properties. You can opt out anytime. See all of our newsletters "The whole reason we started Anthropic is to be able to build and develop this technology in a way that is ethical, responsible, fair, and I think it's really incumbent upon everybody at the company, but especially leadership, to say, all of these numbers, they're actually not the point," Amodei said at this year's Bloomberg Tech Summit in San Francisco yesterday (June 4). Anthropic was founded by seven former OpenAI employees, including Daniela and her brother, Dario, who is the company's CEO, aiming to build a more transparent and safety-focused A.I. firm. Its divergence from OpenAI extends beyond positioning to how it plans to grow. The company has emphasized securing compute capacity, including a deal with Elon Musk's SpaceX (which absorbed xAI earlier this year) to access its data centers in Memphis that will cost $1.25 billion per month. But Amodei said Anthropic is deliberately avoiding the aggressive spending levels seen elsewhere. OpenAI has projected as much as $600 billion in compute spending by 2030; Anthropic expects to spend roughly one-third of that. "The structure of these deals is you have to commit to a certain amount of compute reasonably far in advance, and [we don't want to] overextend ourselves such that we're buying more compute than we could productively use," Amodei explained. "We would much prefer to be on the side of having a little bit more demand for the product than we're able to serve than the inverse, where you overshoot and then you're not in a great situation, because you've bought something you can't pay for down the road." While Anthropic has also expressed interest in more speculative infrastructure, such as SpaceX's proposed orbital data centers, Amodei said there are "no immediate plans for working with astronauts to get space data centers going." "But you never know," she added. Product strategy marks another key split. Anthropic has prioritized enterprise and coding use cases over mass-market consumer engagement. That contrasts with OpenAI, where more than 70 percent of ChatGPT usage is tied to personal tasks such as search, tutoring and life advice. "We have always felt that enterprise and business are the best spiritual fit for Anthropic and our values," Amodei said. "The difference in our consumer product compared to competitors is that we're not an entertainment tool. It's really for productive activities, whether those are at work or at home." Both companies, however, are investing heavily in advanced cybersecurity A.I. Anthropic's Claude Mythos has raised concerns about its ability to exploit vulnerabilities. OpenAI's Daybreak targets similar risks but takes a different approach to deployment. Daybreak is integrated into existing GPT workflows and offered in tiered access based on user verification. Mythos operates as a closed consortium limited to vetted organizations across roughly 15 countries, including the U.S. government, NATO, ENISA, Samsung and Okta. "You have to give the defenders a head start," said Amodei. "A.I. models are going to keep advancing. If it's not us one day releasing a Mythos-level model [to the public], another A.I. company will." Anthropic has also taken a more cautious stance on government work. The company withdrew from a Pentagon contract involving domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons, which OpenAI later assumed. Still, Amodei described broader collaboration with the U.S. government as positive. "Every company is going to have its own principles about what its red lines and values are," she said. "It's important that, whatever those values are for you as a company, you are true to them, you feel like you can explain them to employees and to the world more broadly."

Anthropic vs OpenAI: Behind the bitter battle for the future of AI

The fierce competition between Anthropic and OpenAI is accelerating AI advancements and driving a race towards blockbuster IPOs. This rivalry is shaping investor perceptions and establishing key leaders in the AI space. The companies are also clashing over financial reporting methods, with OpenAI questioning Anthropic's revenue recognition. If not for the intense rivalry between Anthropic and OpenAI, the generative AI boom might not have arrived so quickly. In late 2022, OpenAI caught wind that Anthropic was working on an AI-powered chatbot. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman immediately directed employees to fast-track a competing product, four people familiar with the matter said. Two weeks later, the company released ChatGPT, sparking a technological revolution that promises to overhaul the global economy and the way humans interact. The same urgency now extends to plans for their blockbuster IPOs. The companies are racing to beat one another to market, viewing a first listing as a way to frame how investors will value the companies and establish their CEO as the leading voice of AI. As recently as May, many advisers expected OpenAI would be first to take the initial steps to go public. OpenAI has told some investors it was targeting an IPO as early as September, two people familiar with the matter said. But Anthropic jumped in first, announcing on June 1 it had made a confidential filing with U.S. regulators. OpenAI followed on Monday, a week later. The stakes extend beyond the clash between Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, a former researcher at OpenAI, where he was one of the people responsible for the core technology that made ChatGPT possible. The competition ⁠is spilling into ⁠Wall Street. It's rare for two such big direct rivals to raise capital at the same time, and the IPOs will be so big that they are by necessity turning to some of the same banks for help. OpenAI is looking to go public at a valuation around $1 trillion, Reuters previously reported. Bankers and other advisers are navigating increasingly complex relationships with both OpenAI and Anthropic, three people familiar with the matter said. Executives at both companies have pressed their IPO advisers for insight into the rival's plans, the people said, prompting some banks working with both companies to erect internal barriers between deal teams to prevent information leaks. 'All-out-war' Top bosses often clash. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have traded public barbs as part of their space race, and Bill Gates and Steve Jobs quarrelled over whether Microsoft products had copied from Apple . The tension between Altman and Amodei is the driving force in today's biggest technological revolution - influencing how quickly AI tools are released, what features they include and, ultimately, how people interact with the technology in their daily lives. "It's all-out war between these guys," said Anastasios Angelopoulos, CEO of Arena, a top AI benchmarking and evaluation company. "Every time there's a new release from Anthropic, the bet will be that OpenAI is soon to follow and vice versa." Both companies declined to comment on the CEO rivalry. Fight over revenue recognition The companies are also at odds over how each tells its financial story to investors. OpenAI has told investors and ⁠employees that Anthropic's preferred accounting method overstates its revenue by billions of dollars, according to two people familiar with the matter. In April, OpenAI's chief revenue officer Denise Dresser told employees that OpenAI considers Anthropic's financials inflated, according to a company memo reviewed by Reuters. That's because Anthropic books the full amount that customers pay for its AI services as revenue, but part of that sum is later routed to partners such as Amazon and Google. OpenAI uses a different method, reporting only net revenue after paying its ⁠partner, Microsoft. Anthropic told Reuters that it follows established accounting practices and recognises gross revenue because it is the "principal" in the transaction while its cloud partners are distribution channels. Dresser's internal communications aimed to reassure OpenAI staffers who have been demoralised by Anthropic's rapid growth, two of the people Reuters spoke to said. One reason for "Anthropic to try to beat OpenAI out to the public market is that they will get to set the agenda for how a frontier model reports financials and do so in a way that is favourable to their financial model," said Gil Luria, analyst at D. A. Davidson. The desire to best its rival has, at times, led to tensions within OpenAI. Altman recently clashed with Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar over whether the company could meet the obligations required for a public listing on such a compressed timeline, three people familiar with the matter said. Altman told her to figure it out or hire different bankers and lawyers who could pull it off, they said. Friar has since told advisers that the company's leadership is aligned on timing, another person said. In an interview on CNBC after Anthropic's filing, Altman said he didn't want to rush OpenAI's debut. A long-running feud The rivalry dates back to late 2020, when Amodei left his job as OpenAI's vice president of research with several others to create Anthropic, which promised to prioritise safety. The move was seen by many OpenAI employees as a rebuke of Altman's approach. In early 2022, Anthropic trained the first version of its chatbot Claude, but held it back from public deployment to conduct safety research instead, Anthropic later said. OpenAI had similar projects underway. Some employees were working on a "super-assistant" tool powered by OpenAI's then-advanced models, four people familiar with the matter said. Meanwhile, co-founder John Schulman was separately working on a chat interface. Schulman didn't respond to a request for comment. At one point, OpenAI officials considered launching the chat-based assistant tool in March 2023, alongside the release of its GPT-4 large language model, the four people said. But rumours of Anthropic's project in mid-November galvanised Altman. He directed OpenAI staffers to develop a chatbot that could be ready as quickly as possible. "All ⁠of a sudden, it was like, we got to ship this in two weeks," one of the people said. The product, ChatGPT, was released on November 30, 2022. It quickly became the fastest-growing consumer application in history, drawing millions of users and upending tech giants' previous product roadmaps. Anthropic, which launched its Claude chatbot a few months later, spent about three years catching up to OpenAI. Around late 2024, Amodei redirected researchers to focus on so-called reasoning models after seeing OpenAI's early success there, three people familiar with the matter said. The dynamic flipped in late 2025 when Anthropic, which long focused on business customers, released a powerful update to its Claude Code tool. OpenAI, which generates much of its revenue from consumers paying for ChatGPT, has now redoubled its focus on enterprise software and pulled more resources into its own coding product, Codex. OPEN DISTASTE Relations between the two companies deteriorated after Altman was unexpectedly fired by OpenAI's board in late 2023. As the board cast about for options, directors briefly spoke with Amodei about merging the two labs under his leadership. In a recent deposition, one former OpenAI executive said the idea was considered "extremely briefly" before the board moved on to other ideas. Even so, news of the proposal infuriated many OpenAI employees, three people familiar with the events said. Altman was reinstated within days, but that anger persisted. The feud is becoming increasingly public. In February, Altman slammed Anthropic's Super Bowl ads as "deceptive" for misrepresenting OpenAI's plans to sell ads on ChatGPT. In March, Amodei accused Altman of leveraging Anthropic's dispute with the Pentagon to help OpenAI. At an AI summit in India in February, Prime Minister Narendra Modi encouraged all the tech executives on stage to join hands in a show of unity. In a moment captured in a viral video from the summit, Altman and Amodei, standing next to one another, refused.

Anthropic v. OpenAI: Behind the bitter battle for the future of AI

SAN FRANCISCO/NEW YORK - If not for the intense rivalry between ⁠Anthropic and OpenAI, the generative AI boom might not have arrived so quickly. In late 2022, OpenAI caught wind that Anthropic was working on an AI-powered chatbot. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman immediately directed employees to fast-track a competing product, four people familiar with the matter said. Two weeks later, the company released ChatGPT, sparking a technological revolution that promises to overhaul the global economy and the way humans interact. The same urgency now extends to plans for their blockbuster IPOs.

Anthropic v. OpenAI: Behind the bitter battle for the future of AI

SAN FRANCISCO/NEW YORK -- If not for the intense rivalry between Anthropic and OpenAI, the generative AI boom might not have arrived so quickly. In late 2022, OpenAI caught wind that Anthropic was working on an AI-powered chatbot. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman immediately directed employees to fast-track a competing product, four people familiar with the matter said. Two weeks later, the company released ChatGPT, sparking a technological revolution that promises to overhaul the global economy and the way humans interact. The same urgency now extends to plans for their blockbuster IPOs. The companies are racing to beat one another to market, viewing a first listing as a way to frame how investors will value the companies and establish their CEO as the leading voice of AI. As recently as May, many advisers expected OpenAI would be first to take the initial steps to go public. OpenAI has told some investors it was targeting an IPO as early as September, two people familiar with the matter said. But Anthropic jumped in first, announcing on June 1 it had made a confidential filing with U.S. regulators. OpenAI followed on Monday, a week later. The stakes extend beyond the clash between Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, a former researcher at OpenAI, where he was one of the people responsible for the core technology that made ChatGPT possible. The competition is spilling into Wall Street. It's rare for two such big direct rivals to raise capital at the same time, and the IPOs will be so big that they are by necessity turning to some of the same banks for help. OpenAI is looking to go public at a valuation around US$1 trillion, Reuters previously reported. Bankers and other advisers are navigating increasingly complex relationships with both OpenAI and Anthropic, three people familiar with the matter said. Executives at both companies have pressed their IPO advisers for insight into the rival's plans, the people said, prompting some banks working with both companies to erect internal barriers between deal teams to prevent information leaks. 'All-out war' Top bosses often clash. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have traded public barbs as part of their space race, and Bill Gates and Steve Jobs quarreled over whether Microsoft products had copied from Apple. The tension between Altman and Amodei is the driving force in today's biggest technological revolution - influencing how quickly AI tools are released, what features they include and, ultimately, how people interact with the technology in their daily lives. "It's all-out war between these guys," said Anastasios Angelopoulos, CEO of Arena, a top AI benchmarking and evaluation company. "Every time there's a new release from Anthropic, the bet will be that OpenAI is soon to follow and vice versa." Both companies declined to comment on the CEO rivalry. Fight over revenue recognition The companies are also at odds over how each tells its financial story to investors. OpenAI has told investors and employees that Anthropic's preferred accounting method overstates its revenue by billions of dollars, according to two people familiar with the matter. In April, OpenAI's chief revenue officer Denise Dresser told employees that OpenAI considers Anthropic's financials inflated, according to a company memo reviewed by Reuters. That's because Anthropic books the full amount that customers pay for its AI services as revenue, but part of that sum is later routed to partners such as Amazon and Google. OpenAI uses a different method, reporting only net revenue after paying its partner, Microsoft. Anthropic told Reuters that it follows established accounting practices and recognizes gross revenue because it is the "principal" in the transaction while its cloud partners are distribution channels. Dresser's internal communications aimed to reassure OpenAI staffers who have been demoralized by Anthropic's rapid growth, two of the people Reuters spoke to said. One reason for "Anthropic to try to beat OpenAI out to the public market is that they will get to set the agenda for how a frontier model reports financials and do so in a way that is favorable to their financial model," said Gil Luria, analyst at D. A. Davidson. The desire to best its rival has, at times, led to tensions within OpenAI. Altman recently clashed with Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar over whether the company could meet the obligations required for a public listing on such a compressed timeline, three people familiar with the matter said. Altman told her to figure it out or hire different bankers and lawyers who could pull it off, they said. Friar has since told advisers that the company's leadership is aligned on timing, another person said. In an interview on CNBC after Anthropic's filing, Altman said he didn't want to rush OpenAI's debut. Long-running feud The rivalry dates back to late 2020, when Amodei left his job as OpenAI's vice president of research with several others to create Anthropic, which promised to prioritize safety. The move was seen by many OpenAI employees as a rebuke of Altman's approach. In early 2022, Anthropic trained the first version of its chatbot Claude, but held it back from public deployment to conduct safety research instead, Anthropic later said. OpenAI had similar projects underway. Some employees were working on a "super-assistant" tool powered by OpenAI's then-advanced models, four people familiar with the matter said. Meanwhile, co-founder John Schulman was separately working on a chat interface. Schulman didn't respond to a request for comment. At one point, OpenAI officials considered launching the chat-based assistant tool in March 2023, alongside the release of its GPT-4 large language model, the four people said. But rumors of Anthropic's project in mid-November galvanized Altman. He directed OpenAI staffers to develop a chatbot that could be ready as quickly as possible. "All of a sudden, it was like, we got to ship this in two weeks," one of the people said. The product, ChatGPT, was released on November 30, 2022. It quickly became the fastest-growing consumer application in history, drawing millions of users and upending tech giants' previous product roadmaps. Anthropic, which launched its Claude chatbot a few months later, spent about three years catching up to OpenAI. Around late 2024, Amodei redirected researchers to focus on so-called reasoning models after seeing OpenAI's early success there, three people familiar with the matter said. The dynamic flipped in late 2025 when Anthropic, which long focused on business customers, released a powerful update to its Claude Code tool. OpenAI, which generates much of its revenue from consumers paying for ChatGPT, has now redoubled its focus on enterprise software and pulled more resources into its own coding product, Codex. Open distaste Relations between the two companies deteriorated after Altman was unexpectedly fired by OpenAI's board in late 2023. As the board cast about for options, directors briefly spoke with Amodei about merging the two labs under his leadership. In a recent deposition, one former OpenAI executive said the idea was considered "extremely briefly" before the board moved on to other ideas. Even so, news of the proposal infuriated many OpenAI employees, three people familiar with the events said. Altman was reinstated within days, but that anger persisted. The feud is becoming increasingly public. In February, Altman slammed Anthropic's Super Bowl ads as "deceptive" for misrepresenting OpenAI's plans to sell ads on ChatGPT. In March, Amodei accused Altman of leveraging Anthropic's dispute with the Pentagon to help OpenAI. At an AI summit in India in February, Prime Minister Narendra Modi encouraged all the tech executives on stage to join hands in a show of unity. In a moment captured in a viral video from the summit, Altman and Amodei, standing next to one another, refused. By Deepa Seetharaman and Echo Wang

Anthropic v. OpenAI: Behind the bitter battle for the future of AI

SAN FRANCISCO/NEW YORK, June 11 (Reuters) - If not for the intense rivalry between Anthropic and OpenAI, the generative AI boom might not have arrived so quickly. In late 2022, OpenAI caught wind that Anthropic was working on an AI-powered chatbot. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman immediately directed employees to fast-track a competing product, four people familiar with the matter said. Two weeks later, the company released ChatGPT, sparking a technological revolution that promises to overhaul the global economy and the way humans interact. The same urgency now extends to plans for their blockbuster IPOs. The companies are racing to beat one another to market, viewing a first listing as a way to frame how investors will value the companies and establish their CEO as the leading voice of AI. As recently as May, many advisers expected OpenAI would be first to take the initial steps to go public. OpenAI has told some investors it was targeting an IPO as early as September, two people familiar with the matter said. But Anthropic jumped in first, announcing on June 1 it had made a confidential filing with U.S. regulators. OpenAI followed on Monday, a week later. The stakes extend beyond the clash between Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, a former researcher at OpenAI, where he was one of the people responsible for the core technology that made ChatGPT possible. The competition is spilling into Wall Street. It's rare for two such big direct rivals to raise capital at the same time, and the IPOs will be so big that they are by necessity turning to some of the same banks for help. OpenAI is looking to go public at a valuation around $1 trillion, Reuters previously reported. Bankers and other advisers are navigating increasingly complex relationships with both OpenAI and Anthropic, three people familiar with the matter said. Executives at both companies have pressed their IPO advisers for insight into the rival's plans, the people said, prompting some banks working with both companies to erect internal barriers between deal teams to prevent information leaks. 'ALL-OUT WAR' Top bosses often clash. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have traded public barbs as part of their space race, and Bill Gates and Steve Jobs quarreled over whether Microsoft products had copied from Apple . The tension between Altman and Amodei is the driving force in today's biggest technological revolution - influencing how quickly AI tools are released, what features they include and, ultimately, how people interact with the technology in their daily lives. "It's all-out war between these guys," said Anastasios Angelopoulos, CEO of Arena, a top AI benchmarking and evaluation company. "Every time there's a new release from Anthropic, the bet will be that OpenAI is soon to follow and vice versa." Both companies declined to comment on the CEO rivalry. FIGHT OVER REVENUE RECOGNITION The companies are also at odds over how each tells its financial story to investors. OpenAI has told investors and employees that Anthropic's preferred accounting method overstates its revenue by billions of dollars, according to two people familiar with the matter. In April, OpenAI's chief revenue officer Denise Dresser told employees that OpenAI considers Anthropic's financials inflated, according to a company memo reviewed by Reuters. That's because Anthropic books the full amount that customers pay for its AI services as revenue, but part of that sum is later routed to partners such as Amazon and Google. OpenAI uses a different method, reporting only net revenue after paying its partner, Microsoft. Anthropic told Reuters that it follows established accounting practices and recognizes gross revenue because it is the "principal" in the transaction while its cloud partners are distribution channels. Dresser's internal communications aimed to reassure OpenAI staffers who have been demoralized by Anthropic's rapid growth, two of the people Reuters spoke to said. One reason for "Anthropic to try to beat OpenAI out to the public market is that they will get to set the agenda for how a frontier model reports financials and do so in a way that is favorable to their financial model," said Gil Luria, analyst at D. A. Davidson. The desire to best its rival has, at times, led to tensions within OpenAI. Altman recently clashed with Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar over whether the company could meet the obligations required for a public listing on such a compressed timeline, three people familiar with the matter said. Altman told her to figure it out or hire different bankers and lawyers who could pull it off, they said. Friar has since told advisers that the company's leadership is aligned on timing, another person said. In an interview on CNBC after Anthropic's filing, Altman said he didn't want to rush OpenAI's debut. A LONG-RUNNING FEUD The rivalry dates back to late 2020, when Amodei left his job as OpenAI's vice president of research with several others to create Anthropic, which promised to prioritize safety. The move was seen by many OpenAI employees as a rebuke of Altman's approach. In early 2022, Anthropic trained the first version of its chatbot Claude, but held it back from public deployment to conduct safety research instead, Anthropic later said. OpenAI had similar projects underway. Some employees were working on a "super-assistant" tool powered by OpenAI's then-advanced models, four people familiar with the matter said. Meanwhile, co-founder John Schulman was separately working on a chat interface. Schulman didn't respond to a request for comment. At one point, OpenAI officials considered launching the chat-based assistant tool in March 2023, alongside the release of its GPT-4 large language model, the four people said. But rumors of Anthropic's project in mid-November galvanized Altman. He directed OpenAI staffers to develop a chatbot that could be ready as quickly as possible. "All of a sudden, it was like, we got to ship this in two weeks," one of the people said. The product, ChatGPT, was released on November 30, 2022. It quickly became the fastest-growing consumer application in history, drawing millions of users and upending tech giants' previous product roadmaps. Anthropic, which launched its Claude chatbot a few months later, spent about three years catching up to OpenAI. Around late 2024, Amodei redirected researchers to focus on so-called reasoning models after seeing OpenAI's early success there, three people familiar with the matter said. The dynamic flipped in late 2025 when Anthropic, which long focused on business customers, released a powerful update to its Claude Code tool. OpenAI, which generates much of its revenue from consumers paying for ChatGPT, has now redoubled its focus on enterprise software and pulled more resources into its own coding product, Codex. OPEN DISTASTE Relations between the two companies deteriorated after Altman was unexpectedly fired by OpenAI's board in late 2023. As the board cast about for options, directors briefly spoke with Amodei about merging the two labs under his leadership. In a recent deposition, one former OpenAI executive said the idea was considered "extremely briefly" before the board moved on to other ideas. Even so, news of the proposal infuriated many OpenAI employees, three people familiar with the events said. Altman was reinstated within days, but that anger persisted. The feud is becoming increasingly public. In February, Altman slammed Anthropic's Super Bowl ads as "deceptive" for misrepresenting OpenAI's plans to sell ads on ChatGPT. In March, Amodei accused Altman of leveraging Anthropic's dispute with the Pentagon to help OpenAI. At an AI summit in India in February, Prime Minister Narendra Modi encouraged all the tech executives on stage to join hands in a show of unity. In a moment captured in a viral video from the summit, Altman and Amodei, standing next to one another, refused. (Additional reporting by Milana Vinn, Kenrick Cai and Jeffrey Dastin. Editing by Sayantani Ghosh, Ken Li and Claudia Parsons) By Deepa Seetharaman and Echo Wang