Commentary: What retail investors need to know before jumping into Anthropic’s IPO

GROWTH NUMBERS

Let’s address some important questions. First, what will the growth trajectory be? There isn’t much financial data available at this stage – we’ll have to wait for the prospectus when it’s published. What we do know is that revenues are expected to be in the region of US$100 billion this year – up from about US$10 billion in 2025.

But it’s worth interrogating those numbers more closely.

When you develop an AI agent, you pay Anthropic monthly for “tokens” to access its system and enormous computing power. During the past year, computing costs per task have shot up – semiconductor prices and energy costs have all risen sharply and Anthropic has passed these on. But it means a chunk of that impressive revenue growth is simply programmers paying more to advance existing projects.

Though not unusual for a new software company, that growth – even with my caveat – is still impressive. Some believe it will carry on for years. Certainly, the market opportunity for AI seems huge.

Anthropic estimates that AI is capable of covering more than 80 per cent of tasks in fields including management, business and finance, computing, architecture, law, arts and the media, among others. The company’s strength lies in its Claude coding models and developer tools that can take on this work.

Don’t hang your head in despair and start worrying about your job yet. The theory is fine; the practice so far is very different. What often seems to happen is that the person who has lost 80 per cent of their routine execution tasks now has to spend that time reviewing and debugging the AI tool’s work, to catch all the mistakes it makes and step in where it struggles with messy real-life complexity.