VCs simply can't afford to support cutting-edge AI! Anthropic's CEO makes it clear: the IPO isn't for "cashing out," but solely to "keep the computing black hole alive."

According to Beating's monitoring, amidst the collective rush of cutting-edge large-scale model companies to the secondary market, Daniela Amodei, President and Co-founder of Anthropic, elaborated on the underlying capital logic behind the company's decision to secretly file for an IPO at the Bloomberg Tech conference on June 4th. She clearly pointed out that for large-scale model companies, an IPO is no longer a traditional late-stage exit channel, but rather an inevitable financing option to cope with extreme computing power consumption. Amodei emphasized that cutting-edge AI R&D faces a "double funding black hole": on the one hand, the enormous upfront capital required to train cutting-edge large-scale models; on the other hand, with the explosive growth of user scale, the continuous operating costs of providing inference services to users are equally high. She predicts that as the competition in large-scale models enters a more complex phase, only a few "core large-scale model companies" will ultimately remain in the first tier to advance the frontier, and the computing power funding gap for these companies has exceeded the limits of private venture capital (VC). Only the deep and highly liquid public secondary market can support this level of capital consumption. This IPO strategy aligns perfectly with Anthropic's unique "asset-light" computing power strategy. Unlike OpenAI and xAI, which aggressively invest in building their own data centers, Anthropic adheres to a strategy of not building data centers but flexibly leasing external computing power (such as leasing capacity from SpaceX/xAI). Amodei explained that the demand for large-scale models is extremely difficult to predict accurately, and the company prefers a slightly tight supply of computing power ("product demand slightly exceeds computing power supply") rather than incurring high idle depreciation costs for building its own data centers. By raising substantial cash flow through its IPO, Anthropic can avoid being tied up in heavy assets and has ample resources to flexibly purchase computing power to cope with market fluctuations.