Anthropic sells investors on safety, 'no jerks' culture

Dario Amodei pitched investors on safety and a strict hiring culture on Friday, days before the AI company's stock market debut.

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JPMorgan Chase chief Jamie Dimon at an event hosted by the bank, one of the offering's lead underwriters.

He said that focus had shaped both Anthropic's culture and its strategy, steering it toward business customers and coding tools rather than consumer chatbots, a path not initially chosen by the company's archrival ChatGPT-maker OpenAI.

"We deliberately chose enterprise as a focus because we understood that it was synergistic with our focus on safety," he said.

The listing comes at a sensitive moment for the AI boom. AI stocks have swung sharply as investors question whether heavy spending on the technology will pay off.

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Nvidia, the chip giant at the center of the AI buildout and an Anthropic investor, has been rocked by the resignation of chief executive Jensen Huang after he admitted to an affair with a woman US intelligence reportedly believes was a Chinese spy.

Anthropic set a price range this week of $70 to $78 per share, with the stock, under the ticker name "ANT," expected to beginning trading on Thursday.

At the top of that range, the offering would raise up to $64.4 billion and value the company at about $1.4 trillion, including employee stock options and restricted shares. That is well below the $2 trillion figure floated earlier in the year.

Amodei, who has a doctorate in biology, co-founded Anthropic in 2021 after leaving OpenAI. He told investors the company would keep opening new markets by pushing the limits of its technology.

"AI isn't just one application; it isn't just one market," he said. "You're on an exponential of cognition, and as the exponential proceeds, new markets become possible."

He predicted that fields such as scientific research would be "much larger than coding, in the same way that coding was much larger than chatbots."

Yet "Anthropic tends to under promise and over deliver. We're not going to go out and say we're going to solve this problem and that problem and that problem."

Amodei said he spends "probably 40, 50 percent" of his time on talent and culture, which he called "the most important things."

Every hire goes through a culture interview, he said, and the company has turned down technically gifted candidates who did not fit.

"We don't want people who are jerks. We don't want people who try to steal the show and don't work well with others," he said. "We don't want people who aren't oriented towards the public benefit."

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