It’s a sign of the times that the number wasn’t in the headline of the CNBC article where I first ran into it, but buried four paragraphs in: Investors are casually speculating that by the time Anthropic completes its IPO, it may be worth about $2 trillion.
Just a few months ago, everyone was talking about the roughly $1 trillion IPO valuations expected for SpaceX (which swallowed Musk’s xAI company), OpenAI, and Anthropic. Since then, Anthropic has announced that it is pulling in revenue at seven times the rate it was a year ago.
The irony is that we’ve spent these same few months absolutely swimming in talk about how the AI investment bubble is already bursting. I think we have to consider the simple narrative a lot of people have been holding onto since the first release of ChatGPT in late 2022 — that AI is a do-nothing, go-nowhere buzzword akin to “blockchain” or “Web 3.0” — well and truly debunked.
Past performance is no guarantee of future results, of course. I won’t be surprised by a major market correction. This would burn leveraged investors and shake out less-competitive firms. But importantly, it would reallocate chips and talent to market leaders and fresh upstarts, which could ultimately accelerate frontier AI development.
CNBC points out that SpaceX, now valued at roughly $1.5 trillion, listed “adverse geopolitical conditions” in the “risk factors” section of its prospectus. Anthropic is expected to do something similar, with sources saying that data center backlash is going to be a “key risk factor” in its own prospectus.
I must remind everyone that data center backlash won’t actually stop frontier AI development any more than a market correction would. For that, we’ll need international coordination. But I agree that this is a real risk factor for potential Anthropic investors. A public appetite for a slowdown — even if imprecisely expressed through opposition to hyperscale construction close to home — may be just the signal policymakers need to stop the AI race and avert human extinction.
“Adverse geopolitical conditions” for the win?
The analyses and opinions expressed on AI StopWatch reflect the views of the individual contributors and the sources they cover, and should not be taken as official positions of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.