Anthropic is hiring lawyers preparing for an IPO.
They just signed a 200 million deal with Snowflake and a lot of other exciting AI news around Anthropic that we're going to be covering on the show today.
I'm your host, Jaden Schaefer.
Thanks so much for joining us today.
Really excited to get into this.
I'm coming off of a one-week break I took in Hawaii over Thanksgiving and I'm happy to be back on the mainland, but definitely missing the waves and tropical breeze.
I'll see you next time.
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Okay, let's talk about what's going on with Anthropic.
So the first deal that's, or the first thing that I think is really interesting is this upcoming IPO.
They're preparing for an IPO.
And apparently, according to the Financial Times, they just put out a report that said this could come as early as 2026 next year.
They have actually already hired the law firms.
They've hired Wilson Sonisi to help kick off the process.
And they're also doing a whole bunch of internal checklists to basically prepare for what could be one of the largest IPOs ever.
Now OpenAI is probably going to come out and do their IPO and then they'll top Anthropic at whatever point.
They do that because they have a lot more users.
But this is kind of interesting and exciting and it feels like the first step.
I think Anthropic, it's in their best interest to try to front run and do the first IPO, because But I think OpenAI probably wants Anthropic to go first as well, because they want to see how it goes and then they can decide.
You know, what they would like to do next.
So, with all of this, they're currently looking at raising fundings.
Right now that would value them at about 300 billion.
The last round that they did was $13 billion.
They did it in September.
They raised $13 billion and it gave them $183 billion valuation.
So William Sinosi has been an advisor to Anthropic since 2022.
So it makes a lot of sense to bring them on to prepare for the IPO.
And I think all of this is really interesting because this is all coming, as OpenAI currently is valued at about 500 billion.
So if Anthropic is trying to do like their next raise at 300 billion, they're not that far behind OpenAI, but they're still, you know, not at the same level.
And OpenAI is also reportedly testing the waters for an IPO.
They've started to prepare themselves for the process.
There's no listing date that has been kind of floated out there.
But we see all of these big companies getting ready for a big IPO, which is pretty interesting.
The other thing that I thought is pretty crazy with Anthropic and I think this plays into their IPO is they're trying to sign a bunch of enterprise deals.
Whenever you see these companies go out to an IPO, the better the balance sheet, the better the deals they have in the pipe, the stronger a position, the more they can raise.
So Anthropic has just signed a 200 million deal with Snowflake to use their LLM with Snowflake's customers.
This is a pretty big deal.
And I think, as you see, you know, for a couple of things.
Number one it's great for Anthropic, because Snowflake is going to be using them.
So it's more usage that will go through Anthropic.
So it's good for their usage.
It's also good for the bottom line, getting $200, $200 million.
What I will say is this is not an annual deal.
This is a multi-year deal.
So it's kind of has a big sticker shock factor of $200 million up front.
But this is not for one year.
It's it's over time.
What's interesting is in a deal like this, it's typically not $200 million paid today.
When they do these multi-year deals, it's going to be paid out.
But what they'd like to do with these big announcements is to essentially even though it's going to be paid out over time, it's a deal that's locked in.
So Anthropic, when they go and do their IPO, they're like, look, we have this $200 million deal.
And they can kind of point to all of the projected revenue.
Look, we have, you know, a billion dollars in contracted deals out for the next year or two years.
And it puts them in a much stronger position as they as the IPO.
This is what Snowflake's co-founder and CEO Sridharan said about this said.
Anthropic joins a very select group of partners where we have nine-figure alignment, co-innovation at the product level and a proven track record of executing together for customers worldwide.
Together, the combined power of Claude and Snowflake is raising the bar on how enterprises deploy scalable, context-aware AI on top of their most critical business data.
I think this is also coming as sort of a joint go-to-market initiative to bring AI agents to more enterprise customers, which is great.
And this is going to be CloudSonic 45 that is going to be powering Snowflake Intelligence, which is the company's kind of cloud enterprise AI service.
So Snowflake is talking about all this.
They said that their customers are going to be able to use all of the different Cloud models, including Cloud Opus 45, the latest to run multimodal data analysis.
Their customers are also going to be able to use models to bring their own or to build their own custom agents, which is really useful.
The CEO of Anthropic, who is Dario, was talking about this as well and said, quote enterprises have spent years building secure, trusted data environments and now they want AI that can work within those environments without compromise.
This partnership brings Claude directly into Snowflake, where that data already lives.
It's a meaningful step towards making Frontier AI genuinely useful for business.
Okay, what I will say about this deal?
First of all phenomenal, and it's actually coming at a really good time.
So with the latest Sonnet 45 and Opus 45 that have come out, Claude has made a massive upgrade.
And I think specifically with Opus 45 I've noticed for AI Box, my company, we have this vibe tool builder where you essentially can say hey, I want to build a tool that does all of these different things.
We use Opus 4.5 to run that.
And what we found that was really interesting is when we upgraded from Opus 4 to Opus 45 and I bring this up because I think Snowflake is doing some similar things.
But when we upgraded literally the quality of our tools, so like we use it to build tools, the tools and the quality of the tools is increased like 20, I would say, which is kind of interesting because it's not just like oh you know, the model gives me a 20 better response.
When you're using these models to become kind of like the thinking engine and the intelligence which is what Snowflake is doing with Snowflake Intelligence, when you're using it as kind of the engine to power building things and building agents, right?
They're trying to build this like AI agent tool, this AI agent for enterprise customers.
When you use this upgraded tool to actually power those, all of a sudden the tools that are coming out are actually built better and they work better, and the prompts that are going into them are better.
So it's kind of interesting how the upgrade of a model can all of a sudden make tools get better, not just because of how you, but because how they're built.
They're built more intelligently, they're built smarter.
And I've seen this with AI box.
When we upgraded our AI vibe builder got way better, just, just upgrading the model.
So it's really cool.
Anthropic has a bunch of large enterprise deals right now that they've made in the last few months.
Right now, I think they're trying to prioritize selling to businesses instead of individual users.
You'll see OpenAI tout numbers like 800 million weekly active users, which is crazy.
And Anthropic does not have those deals or that kind of usage from individuals.
But what they do have is a lot of businesses that use them.
And I'll even say like for just purely coding.
You know, using Cloud Code and Anthropix.
Cloud Code is what we use exclusively to build AI Box and it is miles ahead of everyone else.
It seems to be the number one tool that developers want to use when building and coding, because it can look at your whole code base.
They have a whole bunch of really cool things they've built into there.
So Anthropix really seems to be focusing on more of that target audience.
I think this is definitely a big contrast from what OpenAI is doing, which is just trying to get like max users Anthropic.
In October made a deal with Deloitte to use Claude in for the consulting giants employee base.
They have over 500,000 staff.
And so Claude is going to be kind of the default model there.
They made that deal in October.
I think the same week they struck a partnership with IBM to bring a bunch of their LLMs into IBM's software products.
And so I think with all of that right now, Anthropic's enterprise success is not very surprising.
Their models are very popular.
I think there was a Menlo Venture survey in July that saw that employees preferred Anthropix AI products over models by other AI companies like Google and OpenAI.
So we're seeing like inside of organizations, this is a very popular model for developers.
This is a very popular model.
They found their niche, they're carving it out.
And I'm really excited because I think they're setting themselves up really well for this IPO that's coming in the future.
They're not just another AI model trying to compete directly with OpenAI, you know, toe for toe.
They have kind of a very specific approach, niches and segments where they're doing enterprise and they're doing developers and they're doing them really well.
So we should see a very exciting IPO.
I'm excited to kind of follow along with that.
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Catch you in the next episode.
