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This month both Anthropic and OpenAI filed for IPOs. Each is likely to be valued at around $1trn. Inevitably, their relative performance is being closely scrutinised. Neither has yet made the paperwork for its listing public, so details of their accounts are sketchy. But Anthropic is getting the better of most comparisons.



Because the two firms are both young and fast-growing, they measure their notional annual turnover by multiplying the figure for the most recent month by 12—a number called annual recurring revenue (ARR). Futurum, a tech-research firm, notes that Anthropic accounts differently for sales through cloud-computing partners, which may flatter its figures. Nonetheless, the trend is unmistakable. Anthropic’s ARR has raced past OpenAI’s (see chart). Anthropic’s valuation, too, has surpassed OpenAI’s, reaching $965bn in May, compared with OpenAI’s $852bn in March. Anthropic has told investors it will generate an operating profit in the second quarter, which would make it the first AI lab to do so, according to Futurum.

There are other signs of strength. For all the talk of an AI bubble, Anthropic’s most recent valuation, at just over 20 times ARR, should be judged in the context of recurring revenues that grew fivefold in the past five months. “It is not necessarily cheap but at these growth rates it is not insane,” says Harrison Rolfes of PitchBook, a data-gatherer. OpenAI is more richly valued. The recent IPO of SpaceX valued it at more than 90 times revenues.

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