MARKETS

Anthropic IPO wouldn't be for the money

AI giant Anthropic has hired the law firm Wilson Sonsini to lay the groundwork for an initial public offering, the Financial Times reported. 

The FT also said Anthropic, the company behind the Claude chatbot and Claude Code developer platform, held discussions with unnamed investment banks about the IPO. It could easily rank among the largest IPOs of all time. The paper’s sources were mixed on when the IPO might happen, with one saying it could happen as soon as 2026 and another offering a more cautious timeline. 

For AI companies, going public provides easier access to capital and public stock for acquisitions. It’s no surprise that Anthropic's top rival, OpenAI, has been caught up in IPO rumors of its own.

Firms that IPO have to make a number of public financial and risk disclosures, which is part of the reason why so many of the world’s most valuable companies remain private. But for Anthropic, there could be benefits in using the IPO disclosure regime to demonstrate its trustworthiness to both enterprises and the public.

“Anthropic is … on a path to $20-26B [in revenue] in 2026. They don’t need capital … they’ve figured out the constraint isn’t funding, it’s trust infrastructure for selling to enterprises at scale,” Aakash Gupta, author of the Product Growth newsletter, wrote on X about the IPO rumblings.

While it’s not profitable yet, Anthropic burns through less cash than some of its competitors, which it says is due to efficiency gains it’s made in model training.

Anthropic — which just closed its last funding round in September — is also in talks for a raise that would value the company at more than $300 billion, the FT reported.

Anthropic has positioned itself as the frontier AI lab most concerned with safety and ethics. At first blush, it’s hard to see how an IPO fits that mandate. The company, which is more financially conservative than some of its competitors, generates significant revenue and can raise seemingly unlimited amounts in private markets. So it’s not like Anthropic needs money. And while going public won’t make founders Dario and Daniela Amodei cede control over Anthropic, it will put company shares in the hands of investors who care more about the stock price than they do about the risks posed by superintelligent AI.

TOGETHER WITH SNYK

Join Snyk Dec. 11: What’s changed in the OWASP Top 10

The updated OWASP Top 10 has officially launched, bringing new categories and shifting priorities that reflect today’s modern application landscape.

On Thursday, December 11, at 11am ET, join OWASP Top 10: Navigating the New AppSec Landscape, a live session with Vandana Verma Sehgal, OWASP Leader and Staff Developer Advocate at Snyk. You'll discover what’s new in the 2025 OWASP Top 10 and how these updates impact developers and AppSec teams. Plus, ISC2 members will earn 1 CPE credit for attending live!

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BIG TECH

AI agent frenzy hits AWS re:Invent

Enterprises can't wait to deploy AI agents, and AWS is dying to help. 

Agents were front and center at Amazon Web Services’ re:Invent in Las Vegas this week. Two of the week’s keynotes featured agentic releases designed to help companies build, deploy, and track their agentic coworkers more quickly and seamlessly. 

“One of the biggest opportunities that is going to change everyone's business is agents,” said Matt Garman, CEO of AWS, in his Tuesday keynote. 

Some of the highlights include: 

• Tools for quality evaluations and policy controls for agents in Amazon Bedrock’s AgentCore platform;

• Systems that allow users to build agents that learn from experience and are easily customizable; 

• And a new offering called "frontier agents,” which go beyond conventional agentic capabilities in autonomy, scalability and how long they can run. Debuting three of these frontier agents in his keynote, Garman called these systems a “step function change more capable than what we have today.”

Amid the mad dash to get these agents into the workforce, it remains unclear whether enterprises and their workforces are ready for them. In a panel at re:Invent on Tuesday, May Habib, co-founder and CEO of agentic AI platform Writer, said that agents could fundamentally change the concept of career progress. 

“You are no longer going to be promoted because you can execute tasks effectively,” Habib said. “You're going to be promoted because you can build systems of agentic orchestration that make these tasks happen.” 

And with all the promises of what agents could be capable of, human employees may be getting uncomfortable. A survey of more than 1,000 workers by EY found that, while 84% of employees are eager about the prospect of agents, 56% worry about their job security. The anxiety comes amid companies such as Salesforce, Klarna, and Accenture slashing staff while pouring more cash into AI. 

“Just looking at this with the realist point of view, the vast majority of the CFOs (and) the C-suite out there are not mincing words around trying to be the most efficient, leanest, fastest company,” Habib said.  

Agents still have quite a few kinks to work out. All AI systems have similar fundamental issues: data, security, hallucination, and bias. This problem is evident in some of the releases at re:Invent that seek to address those key issues, while placing stringent guardrails on what they can and can't do. Still, even with new tooling, enterprises would be wise not to treat these agents as full-blown digital coworkers just yet.

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BIG TECH

OpenAI's 'Garlic' shows it's feeling the heat

OpenAI’s house of cards may be starting to wobble, and the company is starting to look like it's nervously scrambling for answers. 

As competition from Google and Anthropic breathes down its neck, OpenAI is reportedly developing a new large language model, code-named “Garlic,” aimed at outperforming rival models in coding and reasoning tasks, according to The Information.

And Garlic, which may be released as GPT-5.2 or GPT-5.5 by early next year, isn’t the only sign that OpenAI is sweating. 

• The report comes amid rumors that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has signaled a “code red” alert to employees to improve its flagship ChatGPT product, pushing back other product developments to focus on improvements to the chatbot’s speed, reliability and personalization. 

• The company also announced on Wednesday that it’s acquiring Neptune, a company that tracks progress and optimizes the AI model training process, for an undisclosed sum. OpenAI has been utilizing Neptune’s products for more than a year, according to Bloomberg.

• And in a memo reported by The Information in late November, Altman warned employees that Google Gemini’s success would temporarily create economic headwinds and “rough” vibes for the company.

OpenAI has been the darling of the AI industry since its release of ChatGPT, which just celebrated its third anniversary. But the success of competitors like Google, which has received rave reviews for the recent release of Gemini 3, and Anthropic, which comparatively has seen far more sustainable growth with enterprises, is starting to make OpenAI nervous.

OpenAI has tied much of its fate to scaling its technology by signing deals with tech giants like Nvidia, Oracle, and Amazon. It now has mammoth data center commitments totalling more than one trillion dollars with these and other partners. That creates the monumental challenge of making back the cash that it’s burning on this historic buildout. The rising competition to make the most capable LLM and cater to the widest possible audience is only turning up the heat. Should it falter, it may take its big infrastructure partners down with it.

LINKS

• Meta poaches Apple's design lead Alan Dye to level up its AI devices

• IBM CEO says 'no way' massive data center buildout will pay off

• Sequoia partners with Ricursive, an AI lab focused on chip design

• Microsoft denies reports that its AI software sales are underperforming

• OpenAI announces $40.5 million in grants to 208 US nonprofits

• Google's Pichai says people will have to 'adapt' when AI wipes out jobs

• Bloom: An AI-powered branding kit that creates assets with your IP.

• Kamo-1: A new video model from Kinetix that offers more control over your generations. 

• Lux: A computer use model by the OpenAGI foundation that outperformed similar models from OpenAI, Google and Anthropic. 

• AlphaEarth Foundations: A Google Research tool that functions as a virtual satellite to generate maps from local to global scales. 

• Amazon Nova Act: AWS’s new platform for building and scaling reliable agents.

• Anything Max: A vibe coding tool to challenge Lovable and Bolt.

• Meta: Developer Advocate, AI Agents

• Sesame: ML Model Serving Engineer

• Amazon: Applied Scientist

• Together AI: Research Scientist, Large-Scale Learning

GAMES

A QUICK POLL BEFORE YOU GO