AFP, San Francisco

AI giant Anthropic, the maker of the Claude chatbot, announced Monday that it had filed confidentially for an initial public offering (IPO), as Silicon Valley AI companies look to raise the enormous sums needed to fuel the sector’s rapid expansion.

A confidential filing lets a company submit its IPO paperwork to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for review without making its financials and business details public until much later in the process.

“This gives us the option to go public after the Securities and Exchange Commission completes its review,” the company said in a statement. “The proposed initial public offering will depend on market conditions and other factors.”

“The number of shares to be offered and the price have not yet been set,” the company added.

The filing came just days after the company said it raised $65 billion in a new funding round that valued the OpenAI rival at $965 billion, putting it on the cusp of a trillion-dollar valuation.

The latest fundraising round confirmed Anthropic’s place as one of the most significant players in AI, having built its reputation by focusing on delivering generative AI to enterprise clients.

Anthropic’s valuation puts it ahead of OpenAI, which was valued at $852 billion in March and is also aiming to go public, with a filing expected imminently.

Asked by CNBC about his own company’s IPO efforts, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that “going public is a financing event. I don’t think that’s one that we’re focused on.” “I assume we’ll do it (at some point),” Altman added.

Founded in 2021 by siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei and other former executives at OpenAI, Anthropic has positioned itself as a safety-focused alternative in the AI race. Claude Code, its coding assistant for developers, has become one of its most popular products, helping push its projected annual revenue to $47 billion.

Anthropic’s commercial success has been accompanied by difficulties meeting demand for computing power, amid a shortage of chips and servers.

In recent months, the company has faced criticism from users complaining that they were exhausting their usage quotas too quickly and having to pay high prices to continue.