Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity AI Inc., during the Bloomberg Tech conference in San Francisco, California, US, on Thursday, June 5, 2025.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Confused plans to go public in 2028 regardless of how the market receives the Anthropic and OpenAI listings, CEO Aravind Srinivas told CNBC.
“Agnostic of these two companies, we were planning something in 2028 so that remains the case,” Srinivas said in an interview that aired on Tuesday.
Srinivas has previously said that the company has no plans to go public before 2028. His latest comments suggest a more concrete timeline.
The CEO’s comments come after Claude’s developer Anthropic privately filed an initial public offering last week. Although there are no share price details, Anthropic was last valued at around $1 trillion. Meanwhile, OpenAI is reportedly planning an IPO.
These listings, along with SpaceX this week, will be among the largest in history and a test of investor appetite for these mega-IPOs.
“I definitely think there will be ripple effects if it doesn’t go well, like there’s no sugarcoating that. The SpaceX IPO this week will certainly be a leading indicator of how Anthropic or OpenAI will pan out,” Srinivas told CNBC.
“I think it’s important for the AI industry that these IPOs do well, and I actually think they will, because they’re doing well.”
The valuations of both Anthropic and OpenAI, known as frontier labs because their models are among the best in the world, are being scrutinized by investors.
Srinivas said both companies deserve their top honors because they are “on the frontier.” A slowdown in innovation could affect their prices, he said, adding that there are no signs of this happening now.
“If for six months you don’t see that the model has improved in one of these two companies, that’s a problem for them,” said Srinivas.
The use of AI is focused
Business use of AI has come into sharp focus after OpenAI CEO Sam Altman reportedly told a live broadcaster that companies are now discussing how much they are spending on AI. Altman said the cost of AI is “a big problem.”
One of the methods that has emerged is “tokenmaxxing,” where employees increase their use of AI to target productivity. “But people don’t just want to do tokenmax, they want to use whatever model is best for that particular task,” Srinivas said.
The Perplexity product is based on the models of various companies. Its AI, when told, will find the best model that can be used for a given task, taking into account costs.
“If there’s an open source model that gets the job done 90% of the time, I’d use that if it’s 10 to 20 times cheaper than the frontier model,” Srinivas explained. “The future is still exciting for border intelligence, but it will not be a waste of money, as we have seen in the past few months.”
