China Wants To Cripple Anthropic
As Anthropic races toward a high-stakes IPO, China is stepping up its AI ambitions and positioning its cheaper models as a credible rival, raising a question that investors and enterprises cannot ignore.
China’s President Xi Jinping wants to build a better AI mousetrap. He made the claim at a large gathering at the World AI Conference in Shanghai. China can dominate the world’s AI progress. Among his comments was “AI development should not be a solo performance by a single country, but a symphony of international cooperation.” It may be a coincidence that this comes as Anthropic is about to launch its IPO.
The New York Times reports that all signs point to Anthropic’s plan to go public amid many challenges to its model. “The artificial intelligence lab is said to have taken more steps that are consistent with a company aiming to go public in the fall,” the newspaper reported.
China is not the only hurdle. Stiff competition from a number of other companies, which include OpenAI and Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOG | GOOG Price Prediction), means that its technology needs to stay one step ahead of the industry. And, the stock market has shown skepticism about the future of companies that need hundreds of billions of dollars to build out data centers, and whether they remain on the cutting edge of what may be the most important technical advance in history. Anthropic’s value after its large round of funding was $965 billion. Its annualized revenue is about $47 billion, based on recent estimates.
There is ample evidence that China has made impressive advances in AI. According to Bloomberg, “Chinese models are winning over companies worldwide, with their share of US firms’ AI usage nearing a record 60% on the popular marketplace OpenRouter.”
Xi also said China wants to dominate the setting of standards for AI use worldwide. His comments also come with news that a new model from his country’s Moonshot, a private company, can match the strengths of Anthropic’s models.
The brutal battle over which company has the most advanced and useful AI also comes at a time when corporations are asking whether AI products are worth what they have to pay for access to them. In June, Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) said Anthropic’s Claude AI models were too expensive compared to others and that companies are starting to look for alternatives. Of course, as an Anthropic competitor, Microsoft’s objectivity needs to be questioned.
Today, really today, companies need to decide who is right and who is wrong. Does China’s technology come close to Anthropic’s? By almost any measure, it is less expensive. Or is Anthropic’s technology so much better that its high prices are justified? It is among the major questions that the company faces as it goes public.
Contact [email protected] for any questions or corrections.
Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.
McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.
His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.
A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.
TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.
McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.
