As Anthropic Files for IPO, AI Savings Disappoint America’s C-Suites
40% of nearly 1,000 major companies surveyed by Bain & Company found cost reductions from AI use of just 10% or less.
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Anthropic is getting ready to go public. But is the public ready for more Anthropic?
On Monday, the $965 billion artificial intelligence startup confidentially filed for an initial public offering. The news was hardly surprising, but comes as a new Bain & Co. survey of corporate America, seen by Bloomberg over the weekend, reveals this spring’s Great Claude-doption has been far from game-changing.
Token Disclaimers
A few months of heavy AI use has the world at a crossroads: Sure, AI can accomplish plenty of tasks, but at what cost? Last month, Uber Chief Operating Officer Andrew Macdonald said it’s getting harder to justify AI costs, adding that there isn’t a clear link between AI token spend and the creation of new customer features; in April, Uber’s technology chief said the company had already blown through its entire Claude budget for the year. Microsoft, meanwhile, began canceling employee Claude Code licenses last month in favor of its internally built GitHub Copilot CLI tool, a move that appears at least somewhat motivated by cost-cutting.
In May, Reuters reported that Starbucks canned a not-ready-for-primetime AI-powered (though non-Anthropic) inventory management tool after just nine months, and Bloomberg reported on Monday that Walmart is placing a token cap on its employees’ AI usage after high demand.
Those are just a few anecdotes, but the Bain survey of nearly 1,000 companies that pull in more than $100 million in revenue may provide enough data points to prove the trend is pretty concrete:
- About 40% of the surveyed companies achieved cost reductions of 10% or less from AI use, with most having expected much more; just 4% of surveyed companies found AI use led to cost savings of more than 30%. “The technology worked. The value didn’t arrive,” Bain researchers wrote in the report, according to Bloomberg.
- Still, 44% of respondents, the largest share, said they were approving their next wave of AI spend with funding based on targeted savings, rather than realized savings. “It is a circular bet with a structural leak,” Bain warned in the report.
On Claude Nine: Of course, there are plenty of reasons Anthropic is shaping up to be a blockbuster IPO. “The reality of AI right now is that it only works for coding,” Ali Ansari, CEO of model training firm Micro1, told Axios. Anthropic’s Claude tool remains the favorite among coders and has provided the company with a comfortable revenue floor; the company has recently begun telling investors that it’s on track to be profitable in the current quarter. At the very least, that’s more than this year’s other two expected mega-IPOs, SpaceX and OpenAI, can say.
