Hedge fund manager and Altimeter Capital CEO Brad Gerstner expects AI firm Anthropic to go public within weeks, not months, and believes investor demand for the AI firm’s shares could exceed $500 billion.
Imminent Public Offering
Speaking to Scott Wapner on CNBC’s Halftime Report on Oct. 15, Gerstner predicted that Anthropic will go public in “weeks, not months.” Gerstner, who Wapner identified as an early investor in the company who has “been in nearly every major meeting at the White House that they’ve held on AI,” stated, “I suspect here you would have over $500 billion demand for this offering.”
Gerstner, who is known as the primary architect who helped design and spearhead the federal ‘Trump Accounts’ program, drew Anthropic’s comparison to Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (NASDAQ:SPCX), noting that a $100 billion offering generated “about $350 billion of demand.”
Asserting his bullishness on the company, Gerstner argued that “retail investors are going to be excited about this and long only and mutual funds and sovereigns… and they should get the chance to invest in this business.”
Revenues and Market Reaction
Sharing data from Anthropic’s investor day, reporter Kate Rooney stated the company told investors its revenue was “just shy of 17 billion for the third quarter,” which was “up 45%… sequentially.”
Rooney added that Anthropic reported it was profitable on an adjusted basis with “80% plus margins.” Despite these figures, Rooney quoted DA Davidson as stating that “the market does appear to be reading the Anthropic update as a negative.”
Addressing expectations for AI labs, Gerstner cited a conversation with Nvidia Corp. (NASDAQ:NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang, in which Huang indicated that revenues would grow at “least 2x next year.”
Industry Competition and Safety
Discussing AI safety regulations, Wapner quoted a post by Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ:MSFT) CEO Satya Nadella stating, “we need a human-controlled emergency break in case models behave unexpectedly.” Gerstner supported the proposal, calling it a “good idea.”
Regarding his own portfolio, Gerstner revealed he had taken his AI exposure “down to medium small” because the stocks had “got ahead of themselves” in the spring.
However, he remains optimistic about the long-term prospects of frontier AI labs, arguing that they are operating in a “recursive loop where the machine is building more of what comes next” in what he described as “the most competitive market in all of technology.”
Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors.
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