Perplexity plans IPO in 2028 regardless of what happens to Anthropic or OpenAI, CEO tells CNBC

Perplexity is planning to go public in 2028 regardless of how the market receives the listings of Anthropic and OpenAI, CEO Aravind Srinivas told CNBC.

"Agnostic of these two companies, we were planning for something in 2028 so that still remains the case," Srinivas said in an interview that aired on Tuesday.

Srinivas has previously said 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 developer Anthropic confidentially filed for an initial public offering last week. While there are no details on share pricing, Anthropic was last valued at nearly $1 trillion. Meanwhile, OpenAI is also reportedly planning an IPO.

These listings, along with SpaceX this week, are going to be among the biggest in history and a test of investors' appetite for these mega-IPOs.

"I certainly think there will be ripple effects if they don't go well, like there is no sugar coating on that. The SpaceX IPO this week will definitely be a leading indicator to how Anthropic or OpenAI will go out," Srinivas told CNBC.

"I think it's important for the AI industry that these IPOs go well, and I actually think they will go well, because they're doing well."

The valuations of both Anthropic and OpenAI, known as frontier labs because their models are among the leading in the world, are under scrutiny from investors.

Srinivas said that both companies deserve their high valuations because "they are on the frontier." A slowdown in the pace of innovation may dent their valuations, he said, adding that there is no sign of this happening now.

"If for six months you don't see a model capability advance from one of these two companies, then it's a problem for them," Srinivas said.

Enterprise spending on AI has become a key focus after OpenAI CEO Sam Altman reportedly said in a company live stream that companies are now discussing how much they're spending on AI. Altman said AI costs are a "huge issue."

One of the trends that has emerged is "tokenmaxxing," where employees increase their AI use to signal productivity. "But people don't want to just tokenmax, they really want to use whatever model is the best for that particular task," Srinivas said.

Perplexity's product is based on models from various companies. Its AI, when prompted, will figure out the best model to use for the particular task, taking into account cost.

"If there is an open source model that gets the job done 90% of the time, I'd probably use that if it's 10 to 20 times cheaper than the frontier model," Srinivas explained. "The future is still awesome for frontier intelligence, but it's not going to be mindless spending, as we saw in the last few months."