Tech Takeover: Anthropic prepare to go public

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The Hard Shoulder with Ciara Kelly and Shane Colman. On Newstalk with Ciara.

Ciara Kelly (0:39)

And Jess Kelly joins us once again for the Tech Takeover. Jess, Anthropic has been in the headlines this week as they prepared to go public. But what do we actually know about them?

Jess Kelly (0:50)

This is a question, Ciara, that I think more and more of us have to ask. And we need to have these conversations because there's no denying. We'll talk through some of it now. They have had a meteoric rise over the last number of years. So just to take you back to the very, very beginning, this started from OpenAI, so the parent company of Chatchie BT.

A number of people who were working there, they were researchers, they were, some of them were executives in OpenAI, and they broke away to create something different. They expressed concerns around the power and the role of one company in the development of technology that had such potential. So they set out a new company. That's where Anthropic was born from. Now it's really important, and I think it's really interesting to note, this all started in 2021

So only five years ago, but before the launch of Chatchie BT into the wild. So they could see where this was going down the track. They set up this company, there's eight sort of founders, seven of them who are still actively involved. And what they did was they worked on the development of safety, the boundaries that need to be placed around AI. So what it can and can't do, it focused on things such as the AI constitution. So it gave it very clear set of rules of what should happen and so on.

And from there, they set up the company. As OpenAI exploded into the world with Chatchie BT, more people became curious. Then competition was born. We saw a whole host of players coming to the market. And so Anthropic replied by bringing out its own platform called Clod.

Ciara Kelly (2:34)

Okay. Now, that all sounds quite good in terms of their bone of feed days. They had sort of concerns around safety that makes them sound quite ethical. But we know that they're about to launch a big IPO. And they're going to be, you know, worth vast trillions of money or whatever. Whatever they end up being worth.

Are they still, do we think, as concerned about safety? Are they now just about profit? What where do or do we even know?

Jess Kelly (3:01)

Well, we do. We have a good idea based on what we've heard from the executives at the company. They are one of a number of tech giants that have come out and expressed concern about the power and capability of AI.

The CEO has said explicitly that if we don't proceed with caution, this could go catastrophically bad. There are serious and exponential risks to this technology. That being said, the success of Claude and Claude Code, which was one aspect that made them stand out from the rest, that was embraced by a lot of enterprise companies who used it. They realized that they have all these high paid coding executives. Claude Code can do the same thing for a fee. That's why we're seeing some of the chopping and changing in the tech sector at the moment. To give you some numbers, it's just bananas. In 2023, revenue was at $41 million.

That rose in 2024 to 386 million. It rose again in 2025 to 4.59 billion. In the first six months of this year alone, it's reached $16.29 billion.

Ciara Kelly (4:16)

Okay.

The revenue of this company is increasing exponentially. It's not even increasing in a linear fashion. The rate of acceleration is continuing to climb.

But I think that's really interesting what you said about that they can basically replace people who code. Because I remember I had one of my kids going through the CAO system this year. I said, you're really matzy. What about computer science? He goes, well, that's a waste of time, isn't it? I said, why? He goes, nobody's coding anymore, mom. AI doesn't. And so the dogs in the street, the school kids know this. So when we talk about ethics and all of that, was it 25 percent of Microsoft employees are going to be losing their jobs? We heard that this week alone, AI is replacing, AI is coming for our jobs. And there's nothing particularly ethical about that.