The rivalry between Sam Altman and Dario Amodei is entering a new phase. Both AI bosses are planning public listings and hope to use the money to outpace each other in the race to build superintelligent AI.
It has all the ingredients of a Hollywood script: two ambitious tech nerds locked in a high-stakes battle for dominance in artificial intelligence (AI), complete with surprising plot twists.
Take Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, who recently called on the AI industry to pause development, warning that humanity could lose control of the technology.
What made the statement remarkable was its timing: just days earlier, his company had filed paperwork with the US securities regulator, the SEC, to launch an IPO — a first public sale of company shares on the stock market. Anthropic's move caught rival OpenAI off guard. ChatGPT's owner only announced its own plans to go public a week later.
The timing looks well-chosen. Stock markets are buoyant, and AI is everywhere. Anthropic is currently valued at $965 billion (€836 billion); OpenAI at $852 billion (€738 billion). A successful IPO could push both into the exclusive club of trillion-dollar companies, a league currently occupied by only a handful of firms, including Nvidia, Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Tesla. For context: Siemens, Germany's largest publicly listed company, is valued at around $230 billion.
