If all goes to plan, Dario Amodei and his Anthropic co-founders will ring the NASDAQ bell next month to mark the company’s IPO. Their celebration will no doubt be greeted with the traditional high-fiving and back-patting from venture capitalists.
But the story of Anthropic’s rise from a small group of OpenAI defectors to an industry-leading juggernaut, poised for what will likely be the largest IPO of all time, is a far messier narrative than we normally get in Silicon Valley.
For years, VC firms passed on backing Anthropic, fearing its unusual structure and fixation on safety over commercialization made it a bad bet. Today no venture firm owns more than 2% of the company, according to investor documents and half-a-dozen sources with knowledge of the company’s multiple funding rounds. Keeping VCs below that line to ensure no one investor had outsized control was a goal Anthropic communicated to investors, one of these people said.