It has all the ingredients of a Hollywood script: two ambitious techies are locked in a high-stakes battle for dominance in artificial intelligence (AI), complete with a surprising plot twist.
Take Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who recently called on the AI industry to halt development, warning that humanity could lose control over the technology.
What made the statement notable was its timing: Just days earlier, his company had filed paperwork with the US securities regulator, the SEC, to launch an IPO – the first public sale of the company’s shares on the stock market. Anthropic’s move surprised rival OpenAI. ChatGPT’s owner announced its plans to go public just a week later.
The choice of time seems good. Stock markets are excited, and AI is everywhere. Anthropic is currently valued at $965 billion (€836 billion); OpenAI at $852 billion (€738 billion). A successful IPO could push both into the exclusive club of trillion-dollar companies, a league currently occupied by only a handful of companies including Nvidia, Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Tesla. For context: Germany’s largest publicly listed company, Siemens, is worth about $230 billion.
Where does all the money go?
Research firm Gartner estimates that global AI spending will exceed $2.5 trillion this year alone, with the largest portion going toward infrastructure, primarily building and leasing large data centers that provide the raw computing power needed for AI systems.
So far, both companies have funded themselves through private investment rounds, attracting capital from corporations and venture funds that bet on their future success. According to Harrison Rolfes, an analyst at PitchBook, a US-based data and research provider, OpenAI has raised $186 billion since its inception; Anthropic has raised $127 billion.
Anthropic or OpenAI: Which Has Better Chances?
Most financial analysts give Anthropic the edge in the stock market. “Right now Anthropic is the better IPO story and the numbers make that clear,” Rolfes told DW. Anthropic is projected to generate $47 billion in revenue this year, significantly more than OpenAI’s estimated $30 billion, which it will achieve by raising less total capital.
Anthropic also has a strong hold in the corporate market. “More than 1,000 enterprise customers spending more than $1 million annually” on Anthropic, Rolfes noted.
In contrast, OpenAI dominates the consumer market through ChatGPT, which has more than 900 million weekly users. Problem: Most of them use it for free. “Monetizing a massive free user base is a fundamentally different and more difficult problemRolfes said.
Pedro Domingos, professor emeritus of computer science at the University of Washington, largely agrees. “They are leading among business customers, where the most money is likely to come from. But things are still very volatile.”
The demand for anthropics is high, but the computing capacity is low, he said. “Maybe OpenAI should sell compute to Anthropic, but [the two companies] “They hate each other too much for this,” Domingos told DW.
For now, both companies rely heavily on computing resources borrowed from larger partners. OpenAI is dependent on Microsoft, which has a stake in the company. Anthropic is attracted to Amazon and recently also tapped Elon Musk’s Colossus data center.
Amodei and Altman: two egos, one race
The rivalry is also deeply personal. In 2021, Dario Amodei left OpenAI because he was unhappy with the direction Sam Altman was taking the company – too much focus on profit, not enough on responsibility. Since founding Anthropic, Amodei has established himself as a cautious voice in the industry, pushing for stronger AI regulation to guard against the risks.
He also drew a firm line with the US military: Claude, Anthropic’s AI, will not be used for mass surveillance of US citizens or autonomous weapons systems. The Pentagon responded by classifying Anthropic as a “supply chain security risk”, a designation typically reserved for foreign companies.
Sam Altman has stepped in to fill this gap. The OpenAI software is now about to be deployed by the Pentagon, and Altman’s company is being seen as the “bad guy” of the industry.
This is a surprising reversal. When OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit in 2015, responsible AI development was its defining mission — a vision compelling enough to attract top engineers away from Google.
Some experts suspect that Amodei’s cautious public stance is, at least partly, a marketing strategy. Domingos believes the pressure of rapid growth will eventually test Anthropic’s “good guys” image.
“They will have to make difficult choices and adapt,” he said, for example, on the use of AI for military purposes. Anthropic’s CEO “will eventually do what needs to be done, and some Anthropic employees will leave angry because of the betrayal” – just as Dario Amodei and others once left OpenAI.
race for agi
At its core, Domingos said, both companies are pursuing the same goal: Artificial General Intelligence, or AGI — a system capable of performing any intellectual task equal to or better than a human.
The CEOs of both companies “think it’s close, and whoever gets there first will have such an advantage that they’ll take over the board.” Domingos called this argument “dubious, but that’s what they believe.”
PitchBook’s Rolfes urges caution in declaring any winner too soon.
“The battle is not won by getting there ‘first’,” he said. Turning AI into sustainable profits requires widespread adoption, enterprise customer trust, and solid margins. “The real battleground is not ChatGate versus the cloud, it is the AI engines that are embedded inside the world’s largest companies.”
This article was translated from German.