Amodei Tells Dimon Compute Is Anthropic's 'Deepest Business Dilemma' Days Before IPO

Amodei spoke in a livestreamed conversation with Jamie Dimon, chairman and chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, at the bank's Manhattan headquarters. The event was part of the roadshow for Anthropic's initial public offering and one of the last of the week. According to Yahoo Finance, the offering is expected to price on Wednesday, November 18, and the shares are due to start trading on Thursday, November 19. JPMorgan is leading retail sales of the shares in the US.

The compute question matters to anyone weighing the shares. Anthropic has to commit to data centre capacity long before it knows how much demand there will be for its Claude models. If it buys too much, it is left paying for idle infrastructure. If it buys too little, it caps its own revenue. Amodei said the company leans toward caution. "We actually tend to buy on the low side," he said, according to Yahoo Finance. He described a practice of contracting for less capacity in advance than the company's growth projections might justify, then adding more when demand runs ahead of expectations.

Amodei said the listing would widen the company's margin for error. "Just the more cash we have on hand, the more buffer we have between those two things," he said, referring to the gap between compute commitments and demand that is hard to predict. In a separate clip published by Yahoo Finance, he said Anthropic was "not super fussed" about the exact timing of the IPO.

He also tried to temper expectations among new shareholders. Anthropic hopes to "underpromise and overdeliver" as a public company, he told Dimon. The Wall Street Journal used that phrase in the headline of its report on the conversation.

On products, Amodei said Anthropic keeps investing in "safety and security and alignment" and does not want AI agents to "run wild", according to Bloomberg. He also made the long-term case for the technology. "You're on an exponential of cognition, and as the exponential proceeds, new markets become possible," he said. He listed faster scientific discovery, progress against diseases including cancer, Alzheimer's and heart disease, and the use of AI agents in robotics and cybersecurity.

The deal is one of the largest ever attempted. Yahoo Finance, citing Anthropic's IPO website, said the company could raise up to $90.4 billion from the offering and a concurrent private share sale, at a valuation of about $1.4 trillion. A few weeks earlier, investors had expected a valuation as high as $2 trillion. Earlier this week Forbes put the target at about $1.3 trillion. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are lead underwriters alongside JPMorgan, and 19 Wall Street firms are working on the deal. Evercore estimated the banks could share about $395 million in fees, roughly $44 million of it going to JPMorgan.

The IPO is coming at an awkward moment for the market. Borrowing costs have risen, political opposition to US data centre construction has grown, and Nvidia is in turmoil. Nvidia is both one of Anthropic's main chip suppliers and an investor in the company.

Pricing is set for November 18. The roadshow gives investors less than a week to decide how much they believe Anthropic's own caution about demand.