Anthropic is preparing to go public, and its founders have taken the opportunity to send future shareholders one clear message from the outset. All seven of the company’s founders have pledged that Claude will have no ads. They say the chatbot’s sole purpose should remain providing useful answers to users. They wrote this in a letter the company attached to the IPO prospectus released on Monday.
The founders’ argument concerns money and incentives. Once advertising becomes part of revenue targets, they believe pressure grows to make the product hold users’ attention for as long as possible. They want to avoid this pressure. The letter presents this decision as one example of the company prioritizing values over profit.
The founders placed caution regarding the most powerful models in the same category. They initially made the Claude Mythos Preview model available only to selected organizations for cybersecurity work, while the wider public later received Claude Fable 5 with safeguards. According to the company, these measures delayed the release and cost it some revenue and market share. Anthropic gave computer network defenders approximately $100 million in Claude credits.
The stance on advertising is not new. Anthropic first introduced it in early February in a piece titled Claude Is a Space to Think. The company wrote that even ads that did not influence responses and appeared separately in the chat window would undermine what Claude is meant to be: a clean space for thinking and working. An analysis of conversations showed that a significant portion of them concern sensitive or highly personal topics that people might otherwise discuss with a trusted adviser.
However, the company is not entirely opposed to commerce. It wants to continue developing features that allow people to find, compare, or purchase goods, but only when they choose to do so. Anthropic also highlighted its position through ads during this year’s Super Bowl, presenting Claude as a focused, ad-free environment.
The contrast with its largest competitor is striking. OpenAI began as a chatbot for ordinary users and now displays ads to people who use ChatGPT for free. It expects them to generate a large portion of its revenue in the coming years. Anthropic also works with advertising, but from the other side. Although it does not operate an advertising business, it is itself a major advertiser. According to the prospectus, its marketing and advertising expenses increased by $170 million last year and by another $273 million in the first half of this year.
For investors, Anthropic will be one of the year’s most closely watched stocks. The company could raise $100 billion or more, with its valuation ranging between $1.5 trillion and $2 trillion. That would surpass the record set by SpaceX, which raised $75 billion this June. CEO Dario Amodei owns or controls approximately 245 million shares, and each of the other six founders holds more than 200 million Class A shares. The founders appoint three members of the board of directors, while the independent Long Term Benefit Trust appoints four. In the letter, the founders directly warned investors that safety concerns may sometimes lead the company to move more slowly than Google or OpenAI, even if doing so costs it profits.
Source: theinformation.com
