Five things to know about Anthropic ahead of Wall Street debut

Anthropic, the OpenAI rival that bet everything on computer coding, is expected to go public within weeks in a listing that could eclipse SpaceX's record Wall Street debut in June.

Here are five things to know about the company:

Anthropic was founded in 2021 by former OpenAI executives frustrated over how the potential of AI and concerns over safety were not understood or being taken seriously enough.

The company -- whose name means, somewhat paradoxically, "relating to human beings" -- is led by CEO and co-founder Dario Amodei, a San Francisco native with a PhD in biophysics from Princeton University, not computer engineering like so many of his Big Tech peers.

His sister Daniela is also a co-founder and the company's president. Anthropic has 5,000 employees, according to PitchBook.

Until this year, Anthropic was in clear second place to OpenAI, which burst onto the scene with ChatGPT in November 2022, transforming the tech industry and triggering an AI arms race.

But as OpenAI rolled out products from video creation to web browsers, Anthropic aimed far more narrowly, focusing on building the best platform for computer programmers.

That strategy has paid off spectacularly -- coding is the rare AI skill that users are willing to pay handsomely for.

Claude Code, its assistant for developers, has become one of the company's most popular products, helping push projected annual revenue to $65 billion.

Only a small percentage of ChatGPT users, meanwhile, pay a subscription fee -- and OpenAI has put video AI and other side projects on the back burner.

The momentum comes despite severe political headwinds, with Anthropic at loggerheads with the Trump administration -- a state of affairs that could give investors pause.

In March, the government broke off its contracts with Anthropic and designated the company a supply chain risk after it refused to grant the military unfettered access to its AI models.

Anthropic called the Defense Department's move unconstitutional retaliation, and the two sides are now locked in a legal battle that could take years to resolve.

The White House also bristles at Amodei's repeated warnings about the dangers of AI -- including the impact on jobs -- and his calls to regulate its deployment like airlines or banks.

Amodei is also linked with effective altruism, a philosophy of targeted charitable giving scorned by conservatives in Silicon Valley and Washington.

Like OpenAI, Anthropic has massive needs for the computing power and infrastructure required to build so-called frontier models that stay ahead of competitors, amid fears that China could catch up.