OpenAI reboots as Anthropic pulls ahead with IPO planned for September
What's the deal? Anthropic is expected to become the first of the two leading AI labs to go public, with an IPO as early as September, two people familiar with its plans told TIME. The move would cap a year in which the OpenAI rival overtook its larger competitor on key metrics.
Why now? Over the past year, Anthropic seized the business opportunity in AI coding and built Claude Code into a market-defining product. It has since surpassed OpenAI in reported annualised revenue and private-market value for the first time.
The context: Anthropic was founded by former OpenAI staff who broke away from the company. Salesforce, where TIME owner Marc Benioff is chief executive officer, is an investor in Anthropic.
OpenAI's setbacks: As Anthropic surged, OpenAI ceded the lead and endured a string of leadership departures, including Fidji Simo, the former Instacart CEO recruited as Altman's second in command; chief revenue officer Denise Dresser, who left after eight months; and former chief operating officer Brad Lightcap. "We clearly had some missteps as a company," CEO Sam Altman told TIME, citing product direction and pretraining research.
OpenAI's answer: The company is preparing Astra, a new family of AI models it recently previewed for major customers. In one demonstration, 16 AI agents split a research-level maths problem into subproblems and assembled a proposed proof; in another, Astra edited across desktop applications at speed. Altman predicted it would be "the first model where the model actually invents new things in a way that matters."
What could go wrong? OpenAI is contending with mounting pressure, from Meta poaching its researchers to an Apple lawsuit alleging theft of trade secrets, which OpenAI denies. It is also defending at least a dozen California product-liability suits and federal cases alleging ChatGPT reinforced harmful thinking.
The signal: A September listing would make Anthropic the first pure-play AI lab to test public markets, a milestone for a sector that has so far run on private capital. It would also reset the pecking order in a race OpenAI once defined alone.
Read more: time.com
Image credit: Steve Jurvetson
