The SEC's job isn't to adjudicate on whether Anthropic is a good or bad bet for investors. Its job is to ensure that investors have adequate visibility, and then get out of the way.
It would be VERY BAD if we gave politicians arbitrary veto power over who IPOs and who doesn't. The threat of corruption should be obvious.
The SEC would beg to differ with your first para. I imagine that "protect" involves "adjudication":
"Founded to help our country respond to the Great Depression, we’re the agency that protects investors from misconduct, promotes fairness & efficiency in the securities markets, and facilitates capital formation for those looking to hire, innovate, and grow."
You mean like making up non-standard ARR calculations and not including your Q3 results in your initial S1 draft? Or you know hiding things in footnotes in the S1 so people don’t see the full math on your obligations?
They report GAAP earnings, and explain why it is not the best method to understand their current performance. Do you think it is more meaningful to investors to use their convertible notes mark-to-market accounting and worry about a loss that represents "paying their investors what their shares are worth"?
Adjusted revenue figures are reported all the time for many different reasons, there is absolutely nothing special about this and I've not heard ANY financial analyst explain why GAAP is a better number here. You are salivating over a total nothing-burger.
Also, if you didn't hear, their Q3 results were spectacular and were included in an amendment today.
I'm not an Anthropic fan-boy and I won't be buying their offering but you've picked just about the two least relevant things in this offering to complain about.
The reasons to be skeptical of this offering is what is described in the TFA: Anthropic is committed to spending 900 billion on compute over the next decade and if they can only profitably employ 80% of that it will utterly ruin them. Dario is putting all the chips on number 12. If he is right though - and inference usage explode by 1000x Anthropic has so much scarce compute locked up that they will do very, very well.
> “Run-Rate Revenue” is an operating metric that refers to the estimated annualized value of our revenue-generating activity as of a measurement date, calculated as the sum of (i) our consumption-based fees during the trailing 28-day period ended on the measurement date, multiplied by 13, and (ii) our aggregate monthly subscription fees as of the measurement date, multiplied by 12. For purposes of calculating Run-Rate Revenue, consumption-based fees and subscription-based fees are derived from customer usage and active subscriptions.
28 days is 4 weeks, so you don't get fewer or more weekend days arbitrarily. Used very commonly in some industries for financial reporting and also dashboards for software engineers.
You don’t think day of the week matters for Anthropic’s usage numbers?
I don’t have a particular point of view on this but the people acting like this is weird or some big deal have clearly never spent much time with financial filings. There are much weirder scheduling things than this. Some companies split their reporting quarters up in unbalanced ways for instance.
If they make, say, 10x more on weekdays than weekends, using a 30 day month with two extra weekdays overestimates annual revenue since it translates to a year with 264 weekdays as opposed to 260.
~All companies provide non-GAAP numbers alongside the standard ones, and amended S-1s are also extremely common. Neither of those is remotely indicative of anything nefarious
I would certainly consider their "non-cancelable spending commitments" misconduct in their financial reporting obligations. The law doesn't seem to be on my side on that though. I don't have enough hubris to claim the law is wrong, but I don't think I'll retract my position either.
Can you explain your objection more? They have several sections of their S-1 dedicated to this, and it's been public knowledge for a while (the other big IPO this year had it as a pro), so I'm not sure what you mean by "misconduct in their financial reporting obligations"
They can have as many pages of explanation on it as they want, it doesn't address the fact that they need to be factored into headline numbers. It's the distinction between technical correctness and communicative correctness. It's like surprising and unusual clauses in contracts - those are invalid too if you aren't sufficiently upfront about it.
It's an IPO, the P is public. The information needs to be consumable by the public. The level of knowledge that can be expected of a random IPO stock buyer isn't the same as that of a VC or private fund.
And that's exactly where the SEC comes in. The 1930s went wrong enough, no point in doing a 2030s repeat.
> It's an IPO, the P is public. The information needs to be consumable by the public. The level of knowledge that can be expected of a random IPO stock buyer isn't the same as that of a VC or private fund.
I'd wager that the 95th percentile, and maybe the 99th percentile anthropic IPO participant, by volume, is a more sophisticated stock evaluator than either you or me.
It's a baked in poison pill. What that actually says is 'we're holding the economy for ransom, give us the money we want or the economy will crash and we've thrown the steering wheel out of the window'.
The only way to respond to that is to let them crash but then you have an even bigger problem: OpenAI will have an actual monopoly on frontier models in the West.
In all honesty, what are they going to do... raise prices?
Are we to believe the only reason they aren't making a profit is because of competitive pressure? Why would I believe they don't have the same structural issues as Anthropic? That should certainly be the base case assumption even if there wasn't so much evidence of the same kinds of deals and problems.
They have to raise prices and lower expenses or there's no advantage to being a monopoly. I don't think corporate customers will pay higher prices and I see no evidence that they're actually capable of lowering expenses.
They're welcome to stop training anytime and show us how efficient it is to do inference only.
That's assuming Anthropic ceases to exist rather than having to file for bankruptcy and sell off their assets to someone who continues to operate it as a business.
And that you couldn't subsequently do antitrust against OpenAI.
I'll admit in an earlier life I got suckered by Chamath's fast-talking, hyper-confident bluster. Dude was just a conman who got lucky. They say it's better to be lucky than smart.
The SEC did adjudicate the SPAC era. If you think there was a crime that the SEC should pursue then lets discuss this but SPACs are a perfectly valid way to go public.
Everyone gets audited financials before the De-SPAC process occurs.
All the SPACS, the NKLA (truck rolling down a hill) stuff, GME/AMC, Zack Morris crypto pumpers, SAVA (fake Alzheimer's drug) and investigations of shorters was a total disgrace. Truly the golden age of fraud. I don't think we'll see a market that insane for another 20 years.
If the government shouldn’t press its thumb on the scale at the start (fair to argue!) then it shouldn’t press its thumb on the scale when they demand a bailout.
There is zero reason to bailout either. Force a sale of assets to a US-based company? Sure. But no need to bail out. The US has the first second and third best GPU companies and the best five AI companies. Unless they all go under simultaneously then I see zero incentive to bailout.
Why not? The government is allowed to destroy private enterprise as much as the government is allowed to destroy society. Just because you personally disagree with it doesn't mean society doesn't have the right to destroy companies they find to be damaging to society.
Destruction isn't the opposite of bail out, it's just destruction. The government is obligated to do what society wants. From this destruction would come creation by freeing up capital to do more productive things than waste money chasing fantasy rather than providing free school lunches or free university instead (you know the actual things that would generate economic value).
No, they have not. They have incentives to do so, but they are only obligated to follow the law and in the US, even that obligation is relaxed by a lot.
Bailouts have been a wonderful tool in the 21st century. During 2008 crisis, there was an unbelievable high ROI to them, both in the $ value of investments in the banks and in the global economic catastrophe it prevented.
It's not as simple as just looking at the ROI of an individual bailout; what if the crisis itself only happened at the level it did because of the expectation of the bailout in the first place?
> Notably, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC), tasked by Congress with investigating the causes of the financial crisis, cited moral hazard as a component of the crisis, arguing that many factors, including deregulation in the derivatives market in 2000, reduced federal oversight, and the potential for government bailout of "too big to fail" institutions all played a role in increasing moral hazard in the years leading up to the collapse.
The housing bailout also arguably worked extraordinarily well at preventing a much greater, prolonged loss / depression of value in real-estate. The largest bailout in world history went to US homeowners via the Fed de facto purchasing garbage mortgages to pull them off the market.
But isn’t that kicking the can down the road? Isn’t that the reason housing is incredibly over valued and wealth inequality is a huge problem here and around the world?
Yes, but "kicking the can down the road" has been the defining policy in most of the West for the last 60 years as it's what benefits the oligarchs. See, that metaphorical "can" here being kicked doesn't exist for them. It used to, but they rightly believed it wouldn't happen in their lifetime, and now it's locked in thanks to private drone armies if even the shadow of a "can" appears to be forming.
The people who "lost everything" were people who bought houses they couldn't afford by lying about their incomes. Counting on the bubble growing forever.
You are ignoring the many documented cases of predatory mortgage lenders encouraging elderly and otherwise infirm people to switch to the “lower rate mortgages”.
Acting like the only people who had these loan obligations were actively doing something wrong is a total myth.
Meanwhile Wells Fargo, who gave loans to dead people to meet quotas, was made whole and then fined a few token dollars.
The people who "didn't lose everything" were people who were lying about securities being AAA worthy while in reality being filled with subprime junk. Counting on getting bailed out and facing no consequences.
Subprime mortgages were subprime because there was no documentation given to prove incomes/debt of the people they were given to.
The people who defaulted on their mortgages did so because they couldn't afford them. The reason they got a loan that they couldn't afford was because they lied about either their income or their debts while getting the no-doc loans.
The failures in process that led yo the industry allowing people to lie to them without verification is another part of the story but it's completely dishonest to act like the people getting the loans they defaulted on had no agency.
If we universally euthanize people once they reach a certain age and fail to pass certain capability tests, we'd also very likely see an ROI as the costs of maintaining the elderly and their increasing consumption could be put to more productive uses in the economy.
Still... something strikes me as just... well... morally wrong about that.
Ah, so we're redefining "pension" as a kind of "bailout" here? After all, if you think about it, isn't every healthcare intervention also a form of "bailout"? People's health should be allowed to succeed or fail without the moral hazard of bailouts!
(sarcasm marker, because there really are people who think like that)
They also caused it by encouraging banks to make loans to people who couldn't afford to pay them back, to "promote home ownership".
The actual problem wasn't really regulatory, it was that they made a change to a complex system and nobody noticed what the implications were until it was already a Problem.
What happened was, mortgages were always considered safe loans, because if the borrower defaults then you repossess the house and sell it to recover the principal. Meanwhile banks would only make loans to people with good credit, because even if you can repossess the house, doesn't mean you want the trouble. So if you looked at the past, holding mortgages was a good investment.
Then they started allowing the banks to sell the mortgages to investors and for the investors to buy insurance against defaults. Which is fine if the investors/insurers are doing their homework and buying loans that are going to be paid back, but mortgages were considered safe, so they were basically not paying attention. There was a thing where they had some bundles of mortgages rated as AAA when they shouldn't have been, but that was more of a scapegoat for the institutional investors who should have known better to blame somebody else after things started going south.
The actual cause was this: Once the banks started selling mortgages to investors, they no longer cared if the borrower would pay it back, because now that's the investor's problem -- and the investors weren't paying attention. Meanwhile as soon as the bank sells the mortgage, they have the principal back from the investor and can go loan it out again and then sell that mortgage. And while this is happening the government is encouraging it because look at all of these new home owners. So now you have the banks giving mortgages to everybody regardless of creditworthiness, and that's what really caused it.
Because doing that creates a housing bubble, as all the people who can't actually afford a house can now bid up the prices by taking out a loan they won't be able to pay back. And the housing bubble in turn invalidates the assumption that if the borrower defaults you can recover the principal by repossessing the house, because now when the bubble pops, people end up underwater on their mortgages. The value of the house crashes and is now less than the loan principal. So when those borrowers start to default, the investors holding those mortgages and the insurers insuring them were lined up to get smashed. Oops.
I think you moved pretty quick past the part of why mortgages weren't safe.
Mortgages were given to people with no documentation allowed people to lie about their income and get loans they couldn't afford. That was alright because they had low introductory rates/payments they could afford. The market was getting more expensive and you could refinance to a better loan when you're LTV was more favorable before the balloon payments hit.
Those were the loans that were rated AAA.
Once the market growth slowed just enough to not allow the refinancing before the balloon payments, the defaults started, at first slowly then all at once.
If you're going to make a point of it then don't leave out the part about how it happened.
What they were doing was, they'd take a block of subprime mortgages and split them up into tiers. Basically they'd agree to wait to see who defaulted and then the top tiers would get all the mortgages people actually paid back and the bottom tiers got the ones they didn't. If 10% of the mortgages defaulted then anyone who bought at the 10th percentile tier gets all the defaults and everybody else gets paid. If 20% of them defaulted then the ones who bought the 20th percentile tier lose too, but the 30th percentile tier still gets paid.
The highest tiers were rated AAA, because for them to lose you'd have to have preposterously high default rates.
Then we started seeing preposterously high default rates.
Strong contender for most short-sighted comment I've read on HN. Second-order effects? Never heard of them! And if I did, they're all pure speculation anyway! And if they're not, they're much smaller than what was prevented! There was _no_ other option!
This is basically correct, and should not be downvoted.
People forget why the retail banks were bailed out: because they're an essential service that is used on a daily basis! Imagine if you woke up one day and heard that Amazon was bankrupt, and therefore all AWS storage was going to be offline for 30+ days, and if a buyer could not be found the hard disks would be sold off at auction with no opportunity to retrieve your data.
And, yes, from this we can infer which tech companies are "too big to fail" and therefore would be bailed out if ever at risk of imminent bankruptcy and shutdown: the cloud companies. AWS, Google, Microsoft, and probably Cloudflare as well.
The Intel "bailout" was more like the General Motors one, good old fashioned manufacturing protectionism.
Americans should also note that almost all other countries with bank failures had comparable bailouts. A few exceptions: Iceland (failure of Kaupthing forced the UK government to bail out some local authorities who were banking with them!), and Cyprus ("bail in" with loss of money in high value accounts, basically because the EU deemed the country to be too deep in dodgy foreign money to be worth saving).
That would be an excellent argument if the government were a for-profit enterprise. Since it's a government, the opportunity cost of what to spend money on at a critical moment in time when a lot of people are vulnerable seems like the better way to analyze the decision to me.
Although I'm sure this is mostly predicated on my political bias, I'm also reasonably confident that your analysis is as well. I'm not sure you're as aware of it though
It's mainly the FTC, but I think the SEC does enforce some rules on pyramid schemes etc. even if the operators of them aren't being misleading. Certain business models are ruled out.
Not that I think that applies here, just that they go beyond making sure everything has accurate filing and disclosure etc. and do have some mandate to look into the business models themselves in some cases.
Informed consent is informed consent. My point was that informed consent in general is becoming more rare, especially when its government agencies we are expecting to do the informing (the SEC in this case).
I point to the pandemic response as a recent example of where the government completely failed to inform the public of what was going on, what was known, and what was unknown.
Like I would ban controlling share classes. I guess there could be an exception if they had an aggressive conversion provision that turned them into normal shares as the company grew.
You also omit an important constituency in your formulation. Corporations are extended limited liability with the idea that it will benefit the public. The government absolutely should be taking steps to ensure that this is true.
You could but why stop there? I argue that enforcing the standards for compliance and transparency is one of the greatest levers. After that it’s on the market. You will never stop an individual from buying fools gold and in some sense it’s healthy for some to fail no matter how silly the investment was.
Any reason why? To be honest, they never sit well with me either, but not sure what my argument would be for banning them. All investors are well aware of what they're putting their money into.
I think it pairs with the limited liability. It just isn't good to give unaccountable power to anyone. So it isn't about the investors, its about not letting the thing exist.
Yeah, allow loans as appropriate, but stocks ("ownership") should come with voting power exactly proportional to their face value.
Otherwise you're subsidizing oligarchs by cutting investors off from kicking the board the next week if/after it's caught acting against the share holders.
Good thing you're not in charge with your communist attitude. If they kept controlling shares hidden from public, you'd had a point. Nobody is asking you to buy shares of companies with controlling shares.
> Gensler spent his entire time at the SEC doing exactly that type of adjudication
Wasn't his war against SPACs' limited financial disclosures and conflicts of interests, i.e. the way companies went public, versus against any issuer per se?
Adjudicating over public good is literally the point of the government. What are you talking about...? Do you think we live in a libertarian free market paradise?
Yes you are right, but government must act through law. That is, government can’t work by having a bunch of people ad hoc deciding how to use government power. It needs to work by deciding objective principles of operations, called laws, and then enacting those.
That’s why they call it “rule of law”
The article suggests exactly that requiring to delay IPO until 2 consequent quarters of detailed financial audits will be available from Anthropic. Without that there is simply not enough information for an investor to make a rational choice.
It's a highly speculative investment in a company that, based on current trends, relies heavily on technology which doesn't exist yet and experts in the field aren't sure what it will be used for. It lost 42 billion dollars last year.
I'm not even going to say it is a bad investment, it might be a once in a lifetime opportunity. But if the current public information isn't enough to dissuade a buyer then that investor is sophisticated enough that they can wait 2 more quarters after the IPO before buying.
It kills me that I know their whole business is built on a false premise, but those who have never maintained software can't see it.
All that's really happening is that they're borrowing from a source of debt that's completely off the books: software quality debt.
That is the steel wall they are set up slam into at 100mph. Just because tech debt isn't on the books doesn't mean it isn't a force that can halt growth.
It'd be like if we passed 1 million new laws to regulate commerce. That's good for business right? The only thing better would be ten million new regulations
By all accounts, Anthropic has taken on an enormous amount of technical debt in Claude Code (and presumably its other software). What isn’t clear is whether this is actually a problem.
At normal startups, tech debt slams the brakes on product growth, but it takes a lot of years for it to happen. At Anthropic, they’re speed running tech debt, but they also have AI to help them navigate it. Will it be a problem? Don’t know, looking forward to finding out.
> The article suggests exactly that requiring to delay IPO until 2 consequent quarters of detailed financial audits will be available from Anthropic. Without that there is simply not enough information for an investor to make a rational choice.
I plan to invest a (relatively small) amount of money in Anthropic's IPO. The amount of money I plan to invest is so small (around 1–2% of my total portfolio), the downside is minimal – if it crashes to zero, I've lost 1–2%. I don't see how this is "irrational" for me to do–if I want to do it, the risk is something I'm aware of and can handle. I don't think two quarters of financial results is going to change anything, because I'm doing it based on vibes, not based on stock fundamental analysis.
> I don't see how this is "irrational" for me to do
And..
> because I'm doing it based on vibes, not based on stock fundamental analysis.
So it seems that you do agree that you're not acting rationally, but you're okay with that as its contained.
The thing is: if enough people do what you're planning to do, the market is basically broken. Early investors will be getting back healthy returns, based on making ludicrous investments in a very risky business that still hasn't been validated at all. Basically a Ponzi scheme.
With more data, analysts might be able to raise more severe warning flags, that might deter people like you from investing.
Or Anthropic might actually take over the entire economy, and holding its stock might be the only worthwhile economic activity left for us, mere humans. :-)
And rationality is defined as the opposite of whatever is doing things "on vibes" is. You said it yourself, you are going with the vibes on your investment instead of reasoning and logic. And with so little information as there is about Anthropic's IPO reasoning and logic to invest are hard to come by.
You aren't the target for arguing the SEC should delay the IPO, it's for investment vehicles like pension funds that take down the whole economy if they crash.
Pension funds don’t even need to wait for IPOs to invest in companies, and they have actual investment experts on staff, so I don’t really think that’s a major worry.
Then what would you say to big boys and girls (i.e., the moneybags) getting into bed together and decide that the best for all the big boys and girls is to ensure that the public holds the bag – via obvious pathways of funds, pension, and retirement scehemes etc?
> gave politicians arbitrary veto power
:-) That ship has sailed for USA (at least for the time being and its trailing smoke is visible from far away)
> the number of Americans using AI at work fell significantly between the summers of 2025 (46%) and 2026 (33%).
Surprising. I couldn't find the study they're citing, and they didn't include a link. Anecdotally, my friends across various industries (tech, finance, medicine, scientific research) are all using AI more heavily as time goes on.
The link he provides is to a paywall, but bouncing over that, you can see the economist's lack of proper citation too, when they note:
> A survey by Jon Hartley of the University of Texas at Austin and others has found that about 33% of people now use AI at work, down from a peak of 46% in mid-2025.
I think it might also be interesting to see a breakdown of how many people are using the free versions, the basic, pro and enterprise versions of which models from which AI companies and what they are using them for.
If I'm using a tool that in turn uses AI -- like how more and more office stuff has magic autocomplete, or how Teams does automatic transcription and summaries -- am I really using AI?
I am only one data point, but I have been very intentional about significantly reducing my AI usage. Many other people in my network are doing the same where it's reasonable to do so.
Some people are being railroaded into more AI usage by mandate of their organizations, not because they're actually getting personal value out of it.
ETA: I still don't think the SEC should get involved in what companies should or should not be allowed to list publicly beyond certifying that the company is not materially misleading their investors.
It's the railroading that's being decreased. Various tech orgs are pushing back on everyone in the company pushing PRs as they realized is profoundly wasteful and unfair for people to push 10 PRs and then just dump it into someone elses lap to validate. "Claude already made a PR for it" doesn't hold up when you can't make a meaningful judgement on the output. Not every org is there yet, but my read is its happening at places like Goldman.
I'm seeing in offices, usage has gone down significantly. For alot of people, it takes more time to figure out how to get ai to do something vs just doing it.
I'm pretty exhausted by the amount of prompting it takes to get Opus 5.5 to do some things the way I want it done. And I'm fighting against a complex system no human wrote. Claude also writes Jira tickets and voluminous comments that no human reasonably understands, so it's all become a huge clusterfuck. Nobody even runs the project locally so we can't even review the changes until they hit a dev server 30 or 40 minutes later. Been at this company for 8 years and this year has turned into a complete shitshow thanks to the CTO drinking the AI kool-aide. I'm looking for a new job.
I presume codebase is for something critical to your company. To give full keys to the company to unproven foreign entity and lose control of codebase for good... a fireable offense to say the least
It's way worse than that. They made us sign a document that outlines how we are limited in our use of AI (which was reasonable), but then we are told to ignore it and go full 'YOLO' with AI or else, to speed up our work. So we could get fired at any time because we are using AI against the rules we signed, that we were told to ignore by the boss. And I have no doubt they would fire another developer to pay for more tokens.
I have the impression that the gifted can leverage AI a lot more than normal people. My early views about AI were that it would democratize intelligence, but now my opinion is that it will be a huge catalyst for the gifted people, increasing social and economic differences.
From personal experience, what I've seen is the opposite. The less "gifted" attempt to lean on AI to close capability gaps, with results that are amusing at best, and disastrous at worst.
The gifted use it and do better/greater/more, while the less "gifted" can't seem to get too much out of it, or things that are passing novelty at best.
Some people playfully embrace new ways of doing things and others need to be shown. AI is still too open-ended for some.
I think you're right about increasing social and economic differences, though. I remember reading that poverty erodes agency and self-advocacy over time. If the previous paradigm isn't working well for you, you aren't necessarily well-positioned to benefit from the new one. And maybe severely disadvantaged.
> Yet those numbers may have recently levelled off. In May economists at the Census Bureau reported that “ai use remained relatively steady in many sectors over the last six months.” A survey by Jon Hartley of the University of Texas at Austin and others has found that about 33% of people now use ai at work, down from a peak of 46% in mid-2025.
Coincidentally I posted an updated chart of AI use according to the Census Bureau this morning - https://simonwillison.net/2026/Nov/2/census-bureau-super-int... - they changed their methodology in December but the numbers have been trending up in 2026.
Frustratingly, it looks like that only has their 2024 and 2025 data - the 2026 data is what would show that "33% of people now use ai at work" number quoted in the Economist article, but https://generativeairesearch.org/ no longer loads and the Internet Archive don't seem to have captured anything later than 2025.
I am not qualified to make a judgement on the research quality, but it strikes me as a little weird? And also weird to cite when trying to create an "AI is stalling" narrative, because the text of the paper doesn't really support that at all.
The claim seems to be based on a single figure that the authors present as additional context in an appendix, which shows the trends of four surveys, in which only one of the four shows a decline. The authors don't even seem to think the decline is significant enough to comment on except to say that "the plateau in late 2025 reflects declining interest and correlates with google search trends for ChatGPT and Gemini" (which they also show using a chart that does not look like a plateau or decline to me at all).
The methodology and survey questions are included, the numbers seem to be based on a straightforward "Do you use generative AI for your job"?
It's weirdly ChatGPT and Gemini centric, the word "Claude" only appears once, in a definition, and "Microsoft" and "Copilot" are nowhere to be seen. I don't know how much to read into that, it just strikes me as weird and noteworthy in a paper that by its own admission is detecting a trend that is the opposite of everyone else doing large scale surveys on the topic.
Its too early to tell what value will be found especially in large corps, where lot of the institutional knowledge that needs to be transferred into these systems is not straight forward to extract and encode.
It effects who has power in different parts of large systems. So things take time.
Recent example is the time they took time to wrap their head around Cloud. Now look at the revenues they generate for Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Oracle etc. Early days.
That is a weird stat, I would assume it "fell" because all the insane amounts of free compute that was going around died down around those years, and some companies finally made AI policies. My employer (in one of those fancy Fortune lists) still is not using it in a meaningful way for development.
It’s not hard to find fluctuating surveys, but it’s the wrong question to be asking.
The number of people using AI at work could fall to 5%, but if those 5% of people were keeping Claude busy all day and night the overall expenditure on AI could increase.
The growing AI revenues don’t require everyone at the office to be using it. If the software engineers are each spending $10K a month on tokens, it doesn’t matter at all if Bob from HR is doing $0.50 of Copilot queries every day.
The U.S. Census Bureau runs a Business Trends and Outlook Survey⁽¹⁾ (aka BTOS) every two weeks. It goes out to 200,000 U.S. businesses (out of 1.2 million total). One of the questions asks about AI (now SI) usage, and it's a steady climb.
If the SEC allowed the SpaceX IPO they most certainly will allow the Anthropic IPO. From my point of view, the Anthropic IPO is a much more genuine one than the shenanigans that were going on with SpaceX, yet we’re all investing into that through ETFs as well.
Additionally, some ETFs have built in protections to rule out businesses that are not yet profitable (like SpaceX and Anthropic), which I think is a great rule.
That’s the old style IPO though, most IPOs nowadays do not actually raise money.
SpaceX made that even more clear by doing an explicit offering of shares to raise money just months after their IPO, which didn’t raise them any money at all but was just for investors and employees.
> SpaceX made that even more clear by doing an explicit offering of shares to raise money just months after their IPO, which didn’t raise them any money at all but was just for investors and employees
SpaceX raised $85B at their IPO that went all to the company. It was a primary stock ipo so it was all newly issued stock from teh company included teh 15% additional shoe.
The only IPO's i can see on file where companies didn't raies money were 3 direct listings
- Georgia Banking Company (GBC)
- avion Healthcare (DAVI)
- TurboGen Ltd. (TRBG),
If you know any of those companies you are deep into the cash equity markets:)
I'm not sure what you think the "offering" in "initial public offering" means. It is literally the company offering shares to the public...to raise money for the company.
The alternative is a direct listing, where you just list your existing shares on a stock exchange.
Anthropic is expected to raise ca. $100b in their IPO. SpaceX raised $75b. Where did you get the idea that most IPOs aren't raising money?
It used to be the norm for companies to become profitable, then IPO, moreso for megacorps.
If I am remembering my history correctly, the first company to go public with a multi-billion dollar valuation while being unprofitable was Netscape, which kicked off the dotcom bubble.
Make their shares more liquid. It makes it easier to do things like buy companies using stock or sell shares to fundraise. Your shares are worth less as a private company because whoever is getting them is going to have a hard time getting rid of them
It doesn't get much simpler than "Follow the money." You can bet the Trump administration will put up some bullshit obstacles to the Anthropic IPO that will have to be cleared up in court.
The SEC doesn't exist to play favourites. If Anthropic has broken a law they can be blocked for that. If not, then it would be unfair to them to block them for things that other companies with IPOs have done. Live by market primacy, die by market primacy.
Even if so, human endeavors like the SEC are supposed to play favorites according to specific, well-established rules. At that point, it becomes a bit of a stretch to call it "playing favorites".
Or, if you insist on keeping your claim, then when the SEC is playing "favorites", it's "the favorite set of rules", not favorite companies.
The concern is that “bad apples” get into indices and then that starts to rot people’s futures. I’m not sure how that will play out (indices can kick them out, or if the company really fails the market cap will reflect that and the index can “heal”). I’m guessing Enron was part of the index at some point, but we survived that.
Well as we already saw with SpaceX, indices are separate entities that are not fully controlled by the SEC. There are plenty of companies on the market that aren't in indices anyway, you don't need to block a company from the market to block it from the index.
People keep saying “bad apples into indices” but I have yet to truly understand what folks mean. Most of the mainstay indices would not include a fresh on the block new comer and it would generally need to follow other criteria. Yes SpaceX got added to the Nasdaq 100 but that is the whole purpose of that index. People should not be investing their savings in that.
What they mean is that when a company becomes part of an index, like the S&P500, historically, they come in somewhere around approximately rank 500. The S&P naturally results in more buying of winners and more selling of losers, so anyone who owns an S&P ETF will own that stock when its approximately rank 500, and will own more and more of it as it grows to be a bigger part of the index (higher rank).
Now, however, these IPOs are so big that straight away they're at like rank 10, or 15 or whatever. The investors who own the S&P don't experience any of the upside when they grow from rank 500 to 10. They are only exposed to the downside (if they lose value/rank/fall out of the index) or the marginal upside if they continue performing and generating returns.
The point is that given the size of the IPOs relative to other companies, their addition to the index has a much more downside exposure than reasonable upside exposure.
I'm probably butchering my explanation here, so apologies if it sounds odd.
Many people, confuse free market with "laissez Faire". Or people who associate freedom with fewer rules, a common right wing rhetoric.
Another interpretation of freedom is the state guaranteeing the rights, and duties, of everyone. Directly it seems with more laws you have less freedom, but in a society with many opportunistic actors, this can lead to a balance that is actually more fair.
Of course it's nuanced, it's not just anarchy vs fascism. But in free markets, the state should at least uphold acceptable minimums to prevent abuse.
For sure, definitions are abused and we've lost nuance. For example, it is possible to live in a democracy which has an autocratic president.
I started a book last night (Markets, , and Community) which critiques both extremes (libertarian, democratic socialism) on economic and political policy, then attempts to persuade the reader that Market Socialism is something we should try, living up to the professed aims of both.
There’s plenty of argument about how if a company has an IPO then they are, by definition, part of the market. And if you bought an index fund that means to represent a part of the market that this company is in, then that company should be in the index fund.
You had lots of choices, you made this choice, and you can always change your mind. Do we really need to have the government step in to prevent you from having to choose something else?
Yes. There are too many people entire retirements on the line to hide behind the usual song and dance people do around this. What's the alternative. Let them proceed, the bubble burst, tank the market, then have the poorest and least equipped people to manage a recession just suffer? This is exactly what a government for the people could do. Or we could just keep letting rich assholes destroy everything with no consequences.
You aren't required to invest in the stock market. There is nothing stopping you from exclusively investing in CD's, corporate bonds, Government bonds, or even cash for your retirement.
Of course those are less volatile, and therefore provide lower returns, hence you will need to save significantly more and spend significantly less, but that's not you being forced to invest in the stock market. That's just the reality of risk/return trade-offs.
Do you really expect to learn something that you don't already know by making Anthropic do two quarters of audited financials? What happens then? Come up with another reason for delay?
Look, if it makes you feel better, I'm happy to state that I thought the SpaceX IPO price was too high and that it is probably still too high. But in the long run, it might turn out to be a great investment.
I believe that the Anthropic IPO price will be too high, but also in the long run it might turn out to be a great investment.
The most important thing I believe is that this is what I signed up for when I bought lots and lots of VTI. And that I can change to a different set of investments pretty much instantly for 9 hours a day, 5 days a week. With no tax hit because it's in my retirement account.
There is a difference between SoaceX and Anthropic. The former is objectively ahead of competitors by many years while Anthropic is at best by few months and pressure from open weights models is increasing.
So even if one believes in AI the rational choice is to invest into hardware that AI companies needs (GPUs, gas turbines, batteries, solar panels)
Pretty gross seeing this kind of paternalistic view get so much agreement on HN. The "poorest and least equipped people" are invested in the stock market? Give me a break.
The wealthiest Americans have never owned so much of the stock market, with the top 10% now holding a record 93% of US equities, according to Federal Reserve data.
the bottom 50% of Americans owned just 1% of all stocks and mutual fund shares
> There’s plenty of argument about how if a company has an IPO then they are, by definition, part of the market
By portfolio theory, all assets are part of the market. Public and private. The challenge is rebalancing cost, which is driven by transaction costs. Having a tiny percent of every single asset rebalanced every second is great in theory, since you'll be diversified across the market as a whole, but you'll also lose all your money to fees.
This is why the S&P 500 exists. It's a limited number of names that are very liquid, i.e. transactable at scale at reasonable cost. As trading fees went down we saw larger and larger indices.
As long as the S-1 is honest, the SEC is doing its job.
A real risk is the market cap, including insider holdings, being large enough to force the stock into major indices. That makes the stock a must-buy for index funds. That in turn props up the stock regardless of how crappy the financial position and how small the float. That was controversial when Space-X went public. It went into several major indices despite not really being that big in terms of revenue.
It felt a bit dishonest in that they pushed out their S-1 without Q3, and then it turns out Q3 revenue growth is decelerating (which they added in the recent addendum).
That being said, I don't think the government should be involved unless it's to unilaterally ban these "public" companies where shareholders do not have equal voting power with 'founders'.
Over and over again they talk about how Anthropic's margins are getting squeezed. They're so squeezed in fact that Anthropic has merely 85% gross margins! They're earning merely $6 in revenue for every $1 they spend!
It's 85% gross margin only if you divide by "Compute and infrastructure", which does not include personnel, legal settlements, sales, marketing and partnerships, or other operating and administrative. Their total operating expenses (34Bn as of 30th September this year) is slightly higher than their revenue (33Bn as of 30th September this year) which means they have an operating loss of ~0.6Bn so far this year. The majority of the negative numbers lie in debt to Amazon and Google (72Bn + 8Bn other), which is actually mostly convertible notes that to my understanding are never going to be paid back as cash, but as stocks in the company. A valuation of 1-2 trillion would give them plenty of room to pay back that debt with stocks, so imo. that part is a little overblown. IPOing would directly help reduce these numbers.
The spending commitments the article mentions are a little more concerning, but I haven't looked into that so I'm currently taking that with a huge grain of salt (especially since the article felt very biased and politically motivated).
But when it comes to measuring productivity of transformational technology, a lot of things make that hard.
A lot of early use can be considered exploratory, whether it was intended to be or not. Meaning it was productive, but in a way that pays off down the road, not as much up front.
Not only are exploration payoffs not evident early, but they are also likely to be extremely high variance. Food for lots of "Well, of course it was a waste of time!" and "Well, of course it was going to pay off!" concurrent conclusions.
Then there is the fact that real productivity gains achieved early, may be the minority of wins, but are likely happening in places where they will grow very fast. At some point, they will "suddenly" appear and dwarf the losses.
But you don't find a lot of unexpected sweet spots if you don't throw the kitchen sink at them.
The SEC is less of a protective agency and more of a revenue-generating agency (in practice and to some degree in principle). If Anthropic does not go public, you have nothing to stop them from receiving private funding from sovereign wealth funds. You have to understand that the Vision Fund failure did not mean that overnight sovereign wealth funds stopped making money; they are desperate to invest in private companies, and if you look at some of the, ahh... "stories"... you do not see massive non-Western investment in AI companies yet. But they are sitting on a mountain of cash.
Moreover, every branch and division across the US government recognizes one thing... the public market is plateauing. It is not a numbers thing; it is a sentiment thing. The post-pandemic tech boom needs to continue, at least be stabilized. AI's expectation to hit the public market is largely keeping a lot of the momentum going.
If Anthropic does not enter the public market, it is going to be a major distressing event for SEC who make money from regulatory fees and a shit ton of fees from publicly listed companies. There is zero incentive to stop them. The SEC tries its best for the benefit of publicly listed companies, exchanges, brokers, institutional investors etc. who all benefit from the IPO.
Seems like requiring an audit might be the solution to this issue? Why they (or anybody) can go public, with financials that are little more than a pinky-swear, is beyond me.
> That is something obvious to add on relevant public materials
Like the S-1? Where it clearly shows the auditor's opinion where it goes in every S-1? Because pretty much every company going public (through a IPO) in America needs to have audited financials [1].
I think people were not satisfied with that one in S-1. It excludes this year completely and run-rate revenue and net revenue retention not verified, which is kinda big thing. They claim 900% NRR.
This author seems to be focused on if Anthropic will continue to grow and return value in the future. But it's disappointing that no one has questioned why they waited so long to go public. If they had gone public at a $100b evaluation, everyday people and pension funds could have invested in and seen the returns that AI has already delivered. Instead, Anthropic leadership runs around saying how AI need to benefit society as a whole rather than a select few, meanwhile they have kept the benefit of >$1t for themselves and refused to share it with others.
A year ago Anthropic was losing billions per year. I'm sure that if it had listed and then collapsed everyone would've gone "first they run around saying how AI needs to benefit society and then they dump a cash-burning company on pension funds"
But pension funds are already invested in them through the VC funds. The only difference is (more) people would be able to invest in Anthropic without paying management fees to middlemen.
> Most 401ks and pension funds do not invest in pre IPO companies
Pensions do, individuals don’t.
“Less than 1% of the $14 trillion in assets in the defined contribution retirement system is invested in private markets, compared with approximately 24% for U.S. public pension funds and 17% for private pension funds as of 2023” [1].
Even if they are losing money, if they went from $10b to $2t in evaluation, that's still $1.99t in value that has accrued to insiders rather than the general public.
Arguably if you consciously choose to invest on a stock there should be no protection or obstacle other than regulated controls. For indices I see the point of extra protection. Where it gets murky is when you look at retirement funds, where you still have no control, but that should be regulation on the funds themselves rather than the stock.
These days? All rules are maybe this or maybe that depending on political winds.
Frankly, no company should be allowed to IPO without showing steady profit. An exchange or index that promotes IPOs of unprofitable companies diminishes its reputation, and the reputation of all other stocks it indexes.
Anthropic is free to continue selling shares privately. They can setup a website and take cc payments if the care so much.
There are rules for raising money as a startup, namely Series A, B and C funding rounds. To participate in these rounds you need to be an accredited investor (meet specific income or net worth criteria set by the SEC) which insure that you can weather the storm.
In all seriousness, I get the argument that Anthropic is likely foisting a huge liability onto Americans via the ETFs in their retirement plans that’d pick up $AMADEO because it’ll be large cap. But if we’re gonna make that argument, it needs to be by sector or by risk class, not targeted at a single company.
The companies managing ETF's aren't stupid. A lot of them changed their rules to exclude SpaceX and may very well do so for Anthropic, if they feel that it is far too risky.
The only real argument here is that Anthropic has Q3 numbers but they aren't included in the prospectus because they may be bad. Delaying the IPO by a few weeks would solve that problem.
> it was a bit shady they went out of their way to not include that in the initial S-1
This is such a bizarre thread. Did you know they're going to release Q4 results after the IPO? IPO buyers won't even know those numbers until after they buy! (Unlike the the Q3 figures.)
If Anthropic can't easily pay all these commitments, what are the odds that they get all their creditors together and negotiate a mini chapter 11 (e.g. by adding 5 years to the commitment timelines, or canceling a proportion of each commitment)? The creditors have no interest in Anthropic going under, and with enough advanced notice, they can pause or cancel their own investments and probably take reduced losses.
I thought they were going to say, we have a duty to protect the public from the self-mutating swarms of artificial life about to explode onto our networks (as per the Astra/Qwen article on front page), but no, they meant the dubious VC finances!
> Multiple studies, including from organizations notable for their bullishness on AI, suggest LLMs are not accelerating productivity or otherwise generating positive returns on investment for most businesses.
Maybe this is true for most businesses, but that's because most businesses are not really leaning into agentic AI yet. It seems software devs started to use it in 2025 and OpenAI and Anthropic have tried expanding the use cases with their GUIs and webbased agentic systems, which I think means there is incredible growrth opportunity when the masses start adopting it.
The entire A.I. Bubble is one big scam with a few companies flooding the internet with positive reviews for their products and even buying entire companies to put a positive spin on use cases for their product. The Bun purchase comes to mind.
The canary was that these A.I. companies were investing in each other to pump up their stocks and keep them relevant. I would say this is borderline legal.
This is so dumb. Let the market figure it out. If it goes public and crashes, we get a valuable answer that saves tens of billions of wasted capital investment. If it floats, the dude who posts nonsense math can keep filling his subscriptions.
But we all know markets aren’t rational, I’m unconvinced we shouldn’t step in… if I started selling anthrax the government would try to stop me. This product might malfunction and show people how to make said anthrax which would be bad. Same with most things, everyone thinks this is a bubble. I think we should actually just put a cap on how much hardware data centres can buy per year, that would be the sensible solution tbh.
> say the cap could be based on total hardware made to stop the prices from being crazy
That's the policy priority you think we should be focussing on as a nation right now? GPU affordability?
Also, total hardware supply is a function of price. If prices don't go up production doesn't rise. At that point, the government decides who gets what quotas. How do you think that's going to go with our current regime?
Please edit the first sentence out. Keep it civil.
As far as your claim, it's fine to say let the market sort it out, but perhaps consider that pension funds and index funds now represent a market distortion that means anthropic crashing is harder and even if it does would happen after the mandatory purchases by the index funds which is basically a transfer from the public to the insiders at anthropic
There's a 12 month waiting period plus the company has to show 4+ quarters of positive net earnings before qualifying to be included in the S&P 500. Pension and index funds are gonna be ok.
How will 'the market' figure it out when these companies have been directly angling for the too big to fail line? The end result is that they'll get a bailout due to national security interests or something so that the economy doesn't completely shit itself and then we're on the hook for it.
That's why people want the IPO to be blocked because we've seen what happens before.
The sources in this article as so dubious. "ChicagoLand" Chicago chamber of commerce? A Tom's Hardware article from February of '26. Things have changed so much since February, it's not even funny to quote something so old. A bunch of the other articles are from 2025.
This is kind of desperate. The argument falls flat.
To be clear, while the CRSP fast tracked SpaceX’s admission to their total market index, that policy (which states that if a security's total market cap is larger than the breakpoint of the CRSP US Small Cap Index, it is can be added after 5 days of trading) has been in place for at least a decade. Unlike SpaceX’s admission to the Nasdaq, this did not represent a change in policy.
CRSP adjusted their methodology prior to SpaceX IPO being announced. It's part of a larger discussion about what the purpose of an index is and how people invest. Vanguard is not out to screw people's retirement up (quite the opposite really). Anyone is welcome to be part of the discussion, but it's hard to get anyone to take you seriously if you only come out of the woodwork when something "bad" is about to happen.
> you saying you know exact number affected by index drama, and it is small? What is that?
I'm not doing it again for Anthropic. The finance/crypto influencers have clearly found a pitch that entertains.
For SpaceX, $5bn of U.S. funds and $9bn globally were "forced" to buy [1]. Out of $200bn total buying over the first three days [2] and like $45 trillion of index assets in America alone [3].
No, that's the upper end of what it could possibly be. It's what would happen if every manager in the first days after the IPO immediately bought the share. Most indices don't work that way, they rebalance over time, in part to avoid this sort of crowding. (They also have latitude to accept and reject index specifics, e.g. around buying new issues.) Managing tracking error against transaction cost is the whole business of passive management.
Also, let's use $17bn in forced buying–globally–and $12bn domestically. That's just not enough to move anything. It's also a vanishing percentage of total index assets. You're again talking about 0.04% of index assets going to what remains a multi-trillion dollar asset.
How? Which index 8x'd its SpaceX weight because float went up?
> the question is that its bunch of dudes dipped into unqualified investors savings
Unqualified investors? What are you referring to?
There are people who really want this to be a massive scam. And sure, you could argue that like two idiots who didn't know how indices work got duped. But you can't argue it was massive, either in capital-markets scales or even within the scale of the IPO.
Instead what I've seen is a bunch of financial influencers blowing a curiosity out of proportion and then doubling down with misinformation while a bunch of people traded into and out of indices for no particular reason.
The Russell indices, and other indices like the CRSP total market index, might include newly public companies like SpaceX, but the relative weight of them in the index will be float-adjusted, so a company like SpaceX that has kept a lot of its shares locked up will be underrepresented in the index compared to a more established public company.
It's going to get hammered into oblivion long before it gets to where it can end up on sp500. The election, and what happens after may see them delaying the IPO (if I was one to bet)
But it also sort of doesn't matter. Anthropic, not in sp500, ends up a fail then the "bubble" pops and the sp500 gets ugly.
The SEC's job isn't to adjudicate on whether Anthropic is a good or bad bet for investors. Its job is to ensure that investors have adequate visibility, and then get out of the way.
It would be VERY BAD if we gave politicians arbitrary veto power over who IPOs and who doesn't. The threat of corruption should be obvious.
The SEC would beg to differ with your first para. I imagine that "protect" involves "adjudication":
"Founded to help our country respond to the Great Depression, we’re the agency that protects investors from misconduct, promotes fairness & efficiency in the securities markets, and facilitates capital formation for those looking to hire, innovate, and grow."
Unless you're accusing Anthropic of misconduct in their financial reporting obligations I fail to see the connection.
You mean like making up non-standard ARR calculations and not including your Q3 results in your initial S1 draft? Or you know hiding things in footnotes in the S1 so people don’t see the full math on your obligations?
They report GAAP earnings, and explain why it is not the best method to understand their current performance. Do you think it is more meaningful to investors to use their convertible notes mark-to-market accounting and worry about a loss that represents "paying their investors what their shares are worth"?
Adjusted revenue figures are reported all the time for many different reasons, there is absolutely nothing special about this and I've not heard ANY financial analyst explain why GAAP is a better number here. You are salivating over a total nothing-burger.
Also, if you didn't hear, their Q3 results were spectacular and were included in an amendment today.
I'm not an Anthropic fan-boy and I won't be buying their offering but you've picked just about the two least relevant things in this offering to complain about.
The reasons to be skeptical of this offering is what is described in the TFA: Anthropic is committed to spending 900 billion on compute over the next decade and if they can only profitably employ 80% of that it will utterly ruin them. Dario is putting all the chips on number 12. If he is right though - and inference usage explode by 1000x Anthropic has so much scarce compute locked up that they will do very, very well.
This wasn't hidden in the footnotes of the S1. It was quite clearly explained on page 3, under "Select Defined Terms": https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/2130357/000162828026...
> “Run-Rate Revenue” is an operating metric that refers to the estimated annualized value of our revenue-generating activity as of a measurement date, calculated as the sum of (i) our consumption-based fees during the trailing 28-day period ended on the measurement date, multiplied by 13, and (ii) our aggregate monthly subscription fees as of the measurement date, multiplied by 12. For purposes of calculating Run-Rate Revenue, consumption-based fees and subscription-based fees are derived from customer usage and active subscriptions.
> annualized revenue
> trailing 28 days multiplied by 13
I’m not aware of a year that has 13 months of 28 days? Why would you ever calculate it this way?
28*13=364. Months are different sizes so month*12 would be an over-estimate
The year has 52 weeks. 28 days is 4 weeks. 13*4=52
28 days is 4 weeks, so you don't get fewer or more weekend days arbitrarily. Used very commonly in some industries for financial reporting and also dashboards for software engineers.
What industries use 13 months of 28 days for financial reporting?
It’s very common in grocery stores. Kroger for instance reports this way.
If day of the week is important you get more consistent results this way.
Because Anthropic is a grocery store.
You don’t think day of the week matters for Anthropic’s usage numbers?
I don’t have a particular point of view on this but the people acting like this is weird or some big deal have clearly never spent much time with financial filings. There are much weirder scheduling things than this. Some companies split their reporting quarters up in unbalanced ways for instance.
Because their revenue is weekly cyclical.
If they make, say, 10x more on weekdays than weekends, using a 30 day month with two extra weekdays overestimates annual revenue since it translates to a year with 264 weekdays as opposed to 260.
That's about a 1.5% increase.
I was referring to their schedule of obligations aka all the money they’ve promised to pay other people for compute.
It's totally normal for companies to release their own take on the numbers alongside GAAP ones.
~All companies provide non-GAAP numbers alongside the standard ones, and amended S-1s are also extremely common. Neither of those is remotely indicative of anything nefarious
Anyone who doesn’t read footnotes in prospectuses, quarterly reports, etc. has no business investing, full stop.
Footnotes are not some minor FYIs. In financial literature, they’re just a formatting choice. They’re fully part of the document.
I would certainly consider their "non-cancelable spending commitments" misconduct in their financial reporting obligations. The law doesn't seem to be on my side on that though. I don't have enough hubris to claim the law is wrong, but I don't think I'll retract my position either.
Can you explain your objection more? They have several sections of their S-1 dedicated to this, and it's been public knowledge for a while (the other big IPO this year had it as a pro), so I'm not sure what you mean by "misconduct in their financial reporting obligations"
They can have as many pages of explanation on it as they want, it doesn't address the fact that they need to be factored into headline numbers. It's the distinction between technical correctness and communicative correctness. It's like surprising and unusual clauses in contracts - those are invalid too if you aren't sufficiently upfront about it.
It's an IPO, the P is public. The information needs to be consumable by the public. The level of knowledge that can be expected of a random IPO stock buyer isn't the same as that of a VC or private fund.
And that's exactly where the SEC comes in. The 1930s went wrong enough, no point in doing a 2030s repeat.
> random IPO stock buyer
Public-stock buyer or IPO buyer? The latter tend to be sophisticated.
> Public-stock buyer or IPO buyer? The latter tend to be sophisticated.
I absolutely agree. But it's entirely irrelevant, because there's no "must be this (hand gesture) sophisticated to buy IPO stock" rule.
> It's an IPO, the P is public. The information needs to be consumable by the public. The level of knowledge that can be expected of a random IPO stock buyer isn't the same as that of a VC or private fund.
I'd wager that the 95th percentile, and maybe the 99th percentile anthropic IPO participant, by volume, is a more sophisticated stock evaluator than either you or me.
It's a baked in poison pill. What that actually says is 'we're holding the economy for ransom, give us the money we want or the economy will crash and we've thrown the steering wheel out of the window'.
The only way to respond to that is to let them crash but then you have an even bigger problem: OpenAI will have an actual monopoly on frontier models in the West.
In all honesty, what are they going to do... raise prices?
Are we to believe the only reason they aren't making a profit is because of competitive pressure? Why would I believe they don't have the same structural issues as Anthropic? That should certainly be the base case assumption even if there wasn't so much evidence of the same kinds of deals and problems.
They have to raise prices and lower expenses or there's no advantage to being a monopoly. I don't think corporate customers will pay higher prices and I see no evidence that they're actually capable of lowering expenses.
They're welcome to stop training anytime and show us how efficient it is to do inference only.
That's assuming Anthropic ceases to exist rather than having to file for bankruptcy and sell off their assets to someone who continues to operate it as a business.
And that you couldn't subsequently do antitrust against OpenAI.
NVidia would almost have to buy the GPUs to avoid spoiling their own market for years to come. That would be so funny.
It’s astonishing how many people here claim to be financial experts and interpret the Anthropic IPO in a way that makes them look evil.
Note what that explicitly doesn’t say. Any decisions about good or bad investments.
The SEC should adjudicate more. The entire SPAC era should never have happened.
Chamath thinks otherwise.
I'll admit in an earlier life I got suckered by Chamath's fast-talking, hyper-confident bluster. Dude was just a conman who got lucky. They say it's better to be lucky than smart.
Making the carry and fees to unwind a lockup that effectively does nothing is really really profitable.
The SEC did adjudicate the SPAC era. If you think there was a crime that the SEC should pursue then lets discuss this but SPACs are a perfectly valid way to go public.
Everyone gets audited financials before the De-SPAC process occurs.
All the SPACS, the NKLA (truck rolling down a hill) stuff, GME/AMC, Zack Morris crypto pumpers, SAVA (fake Alzheimer's drug) and investigations of shorters was a total disgrace. Truly the golden age of fraud. I don't think we'll see a market that insane for another 20 years.
We should just give the power to people with the most money who pay politicians to give them tax cuts and to not do anything else.
That's VERY GOOD.
Right? Right.
Nah. What’s good is giving lots of money to the GOVERNMENT who wants to subjugate you.
Then they’ll take your money and piss it away because A) it doesn’t belong to bureaucrats; so they’re spendthrift
B) bureaucrats are not gonna use what they buy; so it’s shit
If the government shouldn’t press its thumb on the scale at the start (fair to argue!) then it shouldn’t press its thumb on the scale when they demand a bailout.
Agreed, so also don't bailout.
I don't think anybody in their right mind would ever bailout Anthropic or Nvidia.
Now bailing out somebody who over-invested in Nvidia but also holds the world's retirement savings... now that's something I can believe.
There is zero reason to bailout either. Force a sale of assets to a US-based company? Sure. But no need to bail out. The US has the first second and third best GPU companies and the best five AI companies. Unless they all go under simultaneously then I see zero incentive to bailout.
Agreed. However, “the government” is very much not a monolithic entity.
Why not? The government is allowed to destroy private enterprise as much as the government is allowed to destroy society. Just because you personally disagree with it doesn't mean society doesn't have the right to destroy companies they find to be damaging to society.
Destruction isn't the opposite of bail out, it's just destruction. The government is obligated to do what society wants. From this destruction would come creation by freeing up capital to do more productive things than waste money chasing fantasy rather than providing free school lunches or free university instead (you know the actual things that would generate economic value).
> government is obligated to do what society wants
Not how the rule of law works!
Can always make a new law, or edit an existing one…
To a limit. Rule of law is a principle. Rule by majority with no protection for minority rights is not rule of law, it's rule of the mob.
So government has no obligation to rule by and for the people in your mind?
> government has no obligation to rule by and for the people in your mind?
Literally nobody said this.
No, they have not. They have incentives to do so, but they are only obligated to follow the law and in the US, even that obligation is relaxed by a lot.
Rule of law literally means that the law is the ruler, not government.
Bailouts have been a wonderful tool in the 21st century. During 2008 crisis, there was an unbelievable high ROI to them, both in the $ value of investments in the banks and in the global economic catastrophe it prevented.
It's not as simple as just looking at the ROI of an individual bailout; what if the crisis itself only happened at the level it did because of the expectation of the bailout in the first place?
> Notably, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC), tasked by Congress with investigating the causes of the financial crisis, cited moral hazard as a component of the crisis, arguing that many factors, including deregulation in the derivatives market in 2000, reduced federal oversight, and the potential for government bailout of "too big to fail" institutions all played a role in increasing moral hazard in the years leading up to the collapse.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_hazard#Connection_to_the...
The housing bailout also arguably worked extraordinarily well at preventing a much greater, prolonged loss / depression of value in real-estate. The largest bailout in world history went to US homeowners via the Fed de facto purchasing garbage mortgages to pull them off the market.
But isn’t that kicking the can down the road? Isn’t that the reason housing is incredibly over valued and wealth inequality is a huge problem here and around the world?
Yes, but "kicking the can down the road" has been the defining policy in most of the West for the last 60 years as it's what benefits the oligarchs. See, that metaphorical "can" here being kicked doesn't exist for them. It used to, but they rightly believed it wouldn't happen in their lifetime, and now it's locked in thanks to private drone armies if even the shadow of a "can" appears to be forming.
"Depression of value" aka "making housing more affordable".
Were the normal people who lost everything ever bailed out?
The people who "lost everything" were people who bought houses they couldn't afford by lying about their incomes. Counting on the bubble growing forever.
You are ignoring the many documented cases of predatory mortgage lenders encouraging elderly and otherwise infirm people to switch to the “lower rate mortgages”.
Acting like the only people who had these loan obligations were actively doing something wrong is a total myth.
Meanwhile Wells Fargo, who gave loans to dead people to meet quotas, was made whole and then fined a few token dollars.
The people who "didn't lose everything" were people who were lying about securities being AAA worthy while in reality being filled with subprime junk. Counting on getting bailed out and facing no consequences.
And the massive corporations that bought bad debt? I guess those poor bastards probably couldn't have known any better
I actually didn't say anything about them at all.
"lying about their incomes" What? Say you don't understand the prime mortgage bubble without saying it.
Subprime mortgages were subprime because there was no documentation given to prove incomes/debt of the people they were given to.
The people who defaulted on their mortgages did so because they couldn't afford them. The reason they got a loan that they couldn't afford was because they lied about either their income or their debts while getting the no-doc loans.
The failures in process that led yo the industry allowing people to lie to them without verification is another part of the story but it's completely dishonest to act like the people getting the loans they defaulted on had no agency.
If we universally euthanize people once they reach a certain age and fail to pass certain capability tests, we'd also very likely see an ROI as the costs of maintaining the elderly and their increasing consumption could be put to more productive uses in the economy.
Still... something strikes me as just... well... morally wrong about that.
Ah, so we're redefining "pension" as a kind of "bailout" here? After all, if you think about it, isn't every healthcare intervention also a form of "bailout"? People's health should be allowed to succeed or fail without the moral hazard of bailouts!
(sarcasm marker, because there really are people who think like that)
> and in the global economic catastrophe it prevented.
Didnt the US govt cause the crisis by refusing to regulate derivatives because their donors didnt want it to be regulated.
They also caused it by encouraging banks to make loans to people who couldn't afford to pay them back, to "promote home ownership".
The actual problem wasn't really regulatory, it was that they made a change to a complex system and nobody noticed what the implications were until it was already a Problem.
What happened was, mortgages were always considered safe loans, because if the borrower defaults then you repossess the house and sell it to recover the principal. Meanwhile banks would only make loans to people with good credit, because even if you can repossess the house, doesn't mean you want the trouble. So if you looked at the past, holding mortgages was a good investment.
Then they started allowing the banks to sell the mortgages to investors and for the investors to buy insurance against defaults. Which is fine if the investors/insurers are doing their homework and buying loans that are going to be paid back, but mortgages were considered safe, so they were basically not paying attention. There was a thing where they had some bundles of mortgages rated as AAA when they shouldn't have been, but that was more of a scapegoat for the institutional investors who should have known better to blame somebody else after things started going south.
The actual cause was this: Once the banks started selling mortgages to investors, they no longer cared if the borrower would pay it back, because now that's the investor's problem -- and the investors weren't paying attention. Meanwhile as soon as the bank sells the mortgage, they have the principal back from the investor and can go loan it out again and then sell that mortgage. And while this is happening the government is encouraging it because look at all of these new home owners. So now you have the banks giving mortgages to everybody regardless of creditworthiness, and that's what really caused it.
Because doing that creates a housing bubble, as all the people who can't actually afford a house can now bid up the prices by taking out a loan they won't be able to pay back. And the housing bubble in turn invalidates the assumption that if the borrower defaults you can recover the principal by repossessing the house, because now when the bubble pops, people end up underwater on their mortgages. The value of the house crashes and is now less than the loan principal. So when those borrowers start to default, the investors holding those mortgages and the insurers insuring them were lined up to get smashed. Oops.
I think you moved pretty quick past the part of why mortgages weren't safe.
Mortgages were given to people with no documentation allowed people to lie about their income and get loans they couldn't afford. That was alright because they had low introductory rates/payments they could afford. The market was getting more expensive and you could refinance to a better loan when you're LTV was more favorable before the balloon payments hit.
Those were the loans that were rated AAA.
Once the market growth slowed just enough to not allow the refinancing before the balloon payments, the defaults started, at first slowly then all at once.
> Those were the loans that were rated AAA.
If you're going to make a point of it then don't leave out the part about how it happened.
What they were doing was, they'd take a block of subprime mortgages and split them up into tiers. Basically they'd agree to wait to see who defaulted and then the top tiers would get all the mortgages people actually paid back and the bottom tiers got the ones they didn't. If 10% of the mortgages defaulted then anyone who bought at the 10th percentile tier gets all the defaults and everybody else gets paid. If 20% of them defaulted then the ones who bought the 20th percentile tier lose too, but the 30th percentile tier still gets paid.
The highest tiers were rated AAA, because for them to lose you'd have to have preposterously high default rates.
Then we started seeing preposterously high default rates.
Strong contender for most short-sighted comment I've read on HN. Second-order effects? Never heard of them! And if I did, they're all pure speculation anyway! And if they're not, they're much smaller than what was prevented! There was _no_ other option!
This is basically correct, and should not be downvoted.
People forget why the retail banks were bailed out: because they're an essential service that is used on a daily basis! Imagine if you woke up one day and heard that Amazon was bankrupt, and therefore all AWS storage was going to be offline for 30+ days, and if a buyer could not be found the hard disks would be sold off at auction with no opportunity to retrieve your data.
(a much smaller version of that happened: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49285418 )
And, yes, from this we can infer which tech companies are "too big to fail" and therefore would be bailed out if ever at risk of imminent bankruptcy and shutdown: the cloud companies. AWS, Google, Microsoft, and probably Cloudflare as well.
The Intel "bailout" was more like the General Motors one, good old fashioned manufacturing protectionism.
Americans should also note that almost all other countries with bank failures had comparable bailouts. A few exceptions: Iceland (failure of Kaupthing forced the UK government to bail out some local authorities who were banking with them!), and Cyprus ("bail in" with loss of money in high value accounts, basically because the EU deemed the country to be too deep in dodgy foreign money to be worth saving).
That would be an excellent argument if the government were a for-profit enterprise. Since it's a government, the opportunity cost of what to spend money on at a critical moment in time when a lot of people are vulnerable seems like the better way to analyze the decision to me.
Although I'm sure this is mostly predicated on my political bias, I'm also reasonably confident that your analysis is as well. I'm not sure you're as aware of it though
Agreed, some people like to gamble, and it is not in civilizations long-term interest to preserve the fiscal integrity of the irrational.
People will learn risk-aversion vicariously, or end up living with the consequences of an inflated hubris. =3
It's mainly the FTC, but I think the SEC does enforce some rules on pyramid schemes etc. even if the operators of them aren't being misleading. Certain business models are ruled out.
Not that I think that applies here, just that they go beyond making sure everything has accurate filing and disclosure etc. and do have some mandate to look into the business models themselves in some cases.
Informed consent is extremely important. Its also exceedingly rare today, and the pandemic response didn't help.
How did the pandemic response affect informed consent in the IPO market?
People are really playing madlibs in the comment section these days, sadly
Informed consent is informed consent. My point was that informed consent in general is becoming more rare, especially when its government agencies we are expecting to do the informing (the SEC in this case).
I point to the pandemic response as a recent example of where the government completely failed to inform the public of what was going on, what was known, and what was unknown.
There's middle ground.
Like I would ban controlling share classes. I guess there could be an exception if they had an aggressive conversion provision that turned them into normal shares as the company grew.
You also omit an important constituency in your formulation. Corporations are extended limited liability with the idea that it will benefit the public. The government absolutely should be taking steps to ensure that this is true.
You could but why stop there? I argue that enforcing the standards for compliance and transparency is one of the greatest levers. After that it’s on the market. You will never stop an individual from buying fools gold and in some sense it’s healthy for some to fail no matter how silly the investment was.
> Like I would ban controlling share classes.
Any reason why? To be honest, they never sit well with me either, but not sure what my argument would be for banning them. All investors are well aware of what they're putting their money into.
I think it pairs with the limited liability. It just isn't good to give unaccountable power to anyone. So it isn't about the investors, its about not letting the thing exist.
Yeah, allow loans as appropriate, but stocks ("ownership") should come with voting power exactly proportional to their face value.
Otherwise you're subsidizing oligarchs by cutting investors off from kicking the board the next week if/after it's caught acting against the share holders.
I agree with this. In all the tech cases I've seen it just seems to enable dynastic control with no obvious market, shareholder benefit.
Good thing you're not in charge with your communist attitude. If they kept controlling shares hidden from public, you'd had a point. Nobody is asking you to buy shares of companies with controlling shares.
>isn't to adjudicate on whether Anthropic is a good or bad bet for investors
Gensler spent his entire time at the SEC doing exactly that type of adjudication.
> Gensler spent his entire time at the SEC doing exactly that type of adjudication
Wasn't his war against SPACs' limited financial disclosures and conflicts of interests, i.e. the way companies went public, versus against any issuer per se?
Adjudicating over public good is literally the point of the government. What are you talking about...? Do you think we live in a libertarian free market paradise?
Yes you are right, but government must act through law. That is, government can’t work by having a bunch of people ad hoc deciding how to use government power. It needs to work by deciding objective principles of operations, called laws, and then enacting those. That’s why they call it “rule of law”
The argument is based on visibility.
The article suggests exactly that requiring to delay IPO until 2 consequent quarters of detailed financial audits will be available from Anthropic. Without that there is simply not enough information for an investor to make a rational choice.
It's a highly speculative investment in a company that, based on current trends, relies heavily on technology which doesn't exist yet and experts in the field aren't sure what it will be used for. It lost 42 billion dollars last year.
I'm not even going to say it is a bad investment, it might be a once in a lifetime opportunity. But if the current public information isn't enough to dissuade a buyer then that investor is sophisticated enough that they can wait 2 more quarters after the IPO before buying.
It kills me that I know their whole business is built on a false premise, but those who have never maintained software can't see it.
All that's really happening is that they're borrowing from a source of debt that's completely off the books: software quality debt.
That is the steel wall they are set up slam into at 100mph. Just because tech debt isn't on the books doesn't mean it isn't a force that can halt growth.
It'd be like if we passed 1 million new laws to regulate commerce. That's good for business right? The only thing better would be ten million new regulations
>All that's really happening is that they're borrowing from a source of debt that's completely off the books: software quality debt.
Can you be more specific? Are we talking about technical debt that Anthropic itself took on, or that its customers took on?
customers I think
By all accounts, Anthropic has taken on an enormous amount of technical debt in Claude Code (and presumably its other software). What isn’t clear is whether this is actually a problem.
At normal startups, tech debt slams the brakes on product growth, but it takes a lot of years for it to happen. At Anthropic, they’re speed running tech debt, but they also have AI to help them navigate it. Will it be a problem? Don’t know, looking forward to finding out.
Both. They do it themselves to demonstrate to their customers what a good idea it is.
IPO is a lifetime opportunity to get enormous returns for early investors.
For sure it's not a lifetime opportunity for a regular guy. I expect it to have a similar dynamics as Uber after IPO.
> The article suggests exactly that requiring to delay IPO until 2 consequent quarters of detailed financial audits will be available from Anthropic. Without that there is simply not enough information for an investor to make a rational choice.
I plan to invest a (relatively small) amount of money in Anthropic's IPO. The amount of money I plan to invest is so small (around 1–2% of my total portfolio), the downside is minimal – if it crashes to zero, I've lost 1–2%. I don't see how this is "irrational" for me to do–if I want to do it, the risk is something I'm aware of and can handle. I don't think two quarters of financial results is going to change anything, because I'm doing it based on vibes, not based on stock fundamental analysis.
> I don't see how this is "irrational" for me to do
And..
> because I'm doing it based on vibes, not based on stock fundamental analysis.
So it seems that you do agree that you're not acting rationally, but you're okay with that as its contained.
The thing is: if enough people do what you're planning to do, the market is basically broken. Early investors will be getting back healthy returns, based on making ludicrous investments in a very risky business that still hasn't been validated at all. Basically a Ponzi scheme.
With more data, analysts might be able to raise more severe warning flags, that might deter people like you from investing.
Or Anthropic might actually take over the entire economy, and holding its stock might be the only worthwhile economic activity left for us, mere humans. :-)
> if enough people do what you're planning to do, the market is basically broken
First time?
> So it seems that you do agree that you're not acting rationally, but you're okay with that as its contained.
No, I don’t agree I’m “not acting rationally”. How do you define “rationality”?
1. based on or in accordance with reason or logic
And rationality is defined as the opposite of whatever is doing things "on vibes" is. You said it yourself, you are going with the vibes on your investment instead of reasoning and logic. And with so little information as there is about Anthropic's IPO reasoning and logic to invest are hard to come by.
You aren't the target for arguing the SEC should delay the IPO, it's for investment vehicles like pension funds that take down the whole economy if they crash.
Then they shouldn't invest, no? That is the rational choice for them. When you are not sure and do not have an appetite for gambling, you move on.
Pension funds don’t even need to wait for IPOs to invest in companies, and they have actual investment experts on staff, so I don’t really think that’s a major worry.
> Without that there is simply not enough information for an investor to make a rational choice.
Then the investor can invest in something else if it doesn't have enough information about Anthropic to invest in it.
Then they can stay out of the IPO.
They cant as easily if it becomes part of index funds and such. Given high valuation, it can end up essentially mandatory part of those.
And if bubble pops only after, we get exactly situation VC want - they get reward while everyone else eats the losses they caused.
Investing on IPOs is almost always a bad idea. They are timed for the most expensive moment, and when earnings appear highest.
Then what would you say to big boys and girls (i.e., the moneybags) getting into bed together and decide that the best for all the big boys and girls is to ensure that the public holds the bag – via obvious pathways of funds, pension, and retirement scehemes etc?
> gave politicians arbitrary veto power
:-) That ship has sailed for USA (at least for the time being and its trailing smoke is visible from far away)
> the number of Americans using AI at work fell significantly between the summers of 2025 (46%) and 2026 (33%).
Surprising. I couldn't find the study they're citing, and they didn't include a link. Anecdotally, my friends across various industries (tech, finance, medicine, scientific research) are all using AI more heavily as time goes on.
The link he provides is to a paywall, but bouncing over that, you can see the economist's lack of proper citation too, when they note:
> A survey by Jon Hartley of the University of Texas at Austin and others has found that about 33% of people now use AI at work, down from a peak of 46% in mid-2025.
I think it might also be interesting to see a breakdown of how many people are using the free versions, the basic, pro and enterprise versions of which models from which AI companies and what they are using them for.
If I'm using a tool that in turn uses AI -- like how more and more office stuff has magic autocomplete, or how Teams does automatic transcription and summaries -- am I really using AI?
I am only one data point, but I have been very intentional about significantly reducing my AI usage. Many other people in my network are doing the same where it's reasonable to do so.
Some people are being railroaded into more AI usage by mandate of their organizations, not because they're actually getting personal value out of it.
ETA: I still don't think the SEC should get involved in what companies should or should not be allowed to list publicly beyond certifying that the company is not materially misleading their investors.
It's the railroading that's being decreased. Various tech orgs are pushing back on everyone in the company pushing PRs as they realized is profoundly wasteful and unfair for people to push 10 PRs and then just dump it into someone elses lap to validate. "Claude already made a PR for it" doesn't hold up when you can't make a meaningful judgement on the output. Not every org is there yet, but my read is its happening at places like Goldman.
I'm seeing in offices, usage has gone down significantly. For alot of people, it takes more time to figure out how to get ai to do something vs just doing it.
I'm pretty exhausted by the amount of prompting it takes to get Opus 5.5 to do some things the way I want it done. And I'm fighting against a complex system no human wrote. Claude also writes Jira tickets and voluminous comments that no human reasonably understands, so it's all become a huge clusterfuck. Nobody even runs the project locally so we can't even review the changes until they hit a dev server 30 or 40 minutes later. Been at this company for 8 years and this year has turned into a complete shitshow thanks to the CTO drinking the AI kool-aide. I'm looking for a new job.
I presume codebase is for something critical to your company. To give full keys to the company to unproven foreign entity and lose control of codebase for good... a fireable offense to say the least
Sounds like president material to me
It's way worse than that. They made us sign a document that outlines how we are limited in our use of AI (which was reasonable), but then we are told to ignore it and go full 'YOLO' with AI or else, to speed up our work. So we could get fired at any time because we are using AI against the rules we signed, that we were told to ignore by the boss. And I have no doubt they would fire another developer to pay for more tokens.
I have the impression that the gifted can leverage AI a lot more than normal people. My early views about AI were that it would democratize intelligence, but now my opinion is that it will be a huge catalyst for the gifted people, increasing social and economic differences.
From personal experience, what I've seen is the opposite. The less "gifted" attempt to lean on AI to close capability gaps, with results that are amusing at best, and disastrous at worst.
I think this is in line with GPs point, no?
The gifted use it and do better/greater/more, while the less "gifted" can't seem to get too much out of it, or things that are passing novelty at best.
(At least that's how I read it)
I think "proactivity" is the better word here.
Some people playfully embrace new ways of doing things and others need to be shown. AI is still too open-ended for some.
I think you're right about increasing social and economic differences, though. I remember reading that poverty erodes agency and self-advocacy over time. If the previous paradigm isn't working well for you, you aren't necessarily well-positioned to benefit from the new one. And maybe severely disadvantaged.
That sentence links to https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2026/07/28/a...
Here's the relevant paragraph from that story:
> Yet those numbers may have recently levelled off. In May economists at the Census Bureau reported that “ai use remained relatively steady in many sectors over the last six months.” A survey by Jon Hartley of the University of Texas at Austin and others has found that about 33% of people now use ai at work, down from a peak of 46% in mid-2025.
Coincidentally I posted an updated chart of AI use according to the Census Bureau this morning - https://simonwillison.net/2026/Nov/2/census-bureau-super-int... - they changed their methodology in December but the numbers have been trending up in 2026.
As for the "survey by Jon Hartley", I think that's this one: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5136877 - "Job Loss Fears in the First Years of Generative Artificial Intelligence".
They surveyed ~24,000 people with the question "Do you use generative AI for your job?", then later asked which of the following tools they used:
ChatGPT, Midjourney, Claude, Gemini, Github Copilot, Scribe, Embedded products, DeepSeek, Apple Intelligence, Meta AI (Llama), Adobe Firefly
After even more digging, I think I found the raw data for their survey in the Internet Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20250910015550/https://generativ...
Frustratingly, it looks like that only has their 2024 and 2025 data - the 2026 data is what would show that "33% of people now use ai at work" number quoted in the Economist article, but https://generativeairesearch.org/ no longer loads and the Internet Archive don't seem to have captured anything later than 2025.
"ai use remained relatively steady" =/= "Americans using AI at work fell significantly "
Found the paper: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5136877
I am not qualified to make a judgement on the research quality, but it strikes me as a little weird? And also weird to cite when trying to create an "AI is stalling" narrative, because the text of the paper doesn't really support that at all.
The claim seems to be based on a single figure that the authors present as additional context in an appendix, which shows the trends of four surveys, in which only one of the four shows a decline. The authors don't even seem to think the decline is significant enough to comment on except to say that "the plateau in late 2025 reflects declining interest and correlates with google search trends for ChatGPT and Gemini" (which they also show using a chart that does not look like a plateau or decline to me at all).
The methodology and survey questions are included, the numbers seem to be based on a straightforward "Do you use generative AI for your job"?
It's weirdly ChatGPT and Gemini centric, the word "Claude" only appears once, in a definition, and "Microsoft" and "Copilot" are nowhere to be seen. I don't know how much to read into that, it just strikes me as weird and noteworthy in a paper that by its own admission is detecting a trend that is the opposite of everyone else doing large scale surveys on the topic.
If you are not looking at Claude usage then a plateau amongst Claude competitors in late 2025 makes perfect sense.
Sure, but "not looking at Claude usage" is a bizarre strategy when it's being incorporated into an argument against Anthropic's IPO.
Its too early to tell what value will be found especially in large corps, where lot of the institutional knowledge that needs to be transferred into these systems is not straight forward to extract and encode. It effects who has power in different parts of large systems. So things take time.
Recent example is the time they took time to wrap their head around Cloud. Now look at the revenues they generate for Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Oracle etc. Early days.
That is a weird stat, I would assume it "fell" because all the insane amounts of free compute that was going around died down around those years, and some companies finally made AI policies. My employer (in one of those fancy Fortune lists) still is not using it in a meaningful way for development.
It’s not hard to find fluctuating surveys, but it’s the wrong question to be asking.
The number of people using AI at work could fall to 5%, but if those 5% of people were keeping Claude busy all day and night the overall expenditure on AI could increase.
The growing AI revenues don’t require everyone at the office to be using it. If the software engineers are each spending $10K a month on tokens, it doesn’t matter at all if Bob from HR is doing $0.50 of Copilot queries every day.
> The growing AI revenues don’t require everyone at the office to be using it.
Don't they? To match expected growth over the years? There's only so much money in software.
Anecdotally, I didn't start using AI at work until after summer 2025, and now it's essential.
The U.S. Census Bureau runs a Business Trends and Outlook Survey⁽¹⁾ (aka BTOS) every two weeks. It goes out to 200,000 U.S. businesses (out of 1.2 million total). One of the questions asks about AI (now SI) usage, and it's a steady climb.
⁽¹⁾ https://www.census.gov/hfp/btos/data
If the SEC allowed the SpaceX IPO they most certainly will allow the Anthropic IPO. From my point of view, the Anthropic IPO is a much more genuine one than the shenanigans that were going on with SpaceX, yet we’re all investing into that through ETFs as well.
Additionally, some ETFs have built in protections to rule out businesses that are not yet profitable (like SpaceX and Anthropic), which I think is a great rule.
If companies were already profitable why would they go public?
To let early investors exit? Most private funds like that have a horizon of 10 years, so they want to sell their investments at some point.
public investment can be magnitudes larger than your profit, allowing growth that would otherwise not be possible
Same reason they take private investments or loans: To grow faster than would be possible without that.
That’s the old style IPO though, most IPOs nowadays do not actually raise money.
SpaceX made that even more clear by doing an explicit offering of shares to raise money just months after their IPO, which didn’t raise them any money at all but was just for investors and employees.
I"m not sure i can agree with your statement.
> SpaceX made that even more clear by doing an explicit offering of shares to raise money just months after their IPO, which didn’t raise them any money at all but was just for investors and employees
SpaceX raised $85B at their IPO that went all to the company. It was a primary stock ipo so it was all newly issued stock from teh company included teh 15% additional shoe.
The only IPO's i can see on file where companies didn't raies money were 3 direct listings
- Georgia Banking Company (GBC)
- avion Healthcare (DAVI)
- TurboGen Ltd. (TRBG),
If you know any of those companies you are deep into the cash equity markets:)
I'm not sure what you think the "offering" in "initial public offering" means. It is literally the company offering shares to the public...to raise money for the company.
The alternative is a direct listing, where you just list your existing shares on a stock exchange.
Anthropic is expected to raise ca. $100b in their IPO. SpaceX raised $75b. Where did you get the idea that most IPOs aren't raising money?
It used to be the norm for companies to become profitable, then IPO, moreso for megacorps.
If I am remembering my history correctly, the first company to go public with a multi-billion dollar valuation while being unprofitable was Netscape, which kicked off the dotcom bubble.
Clearly to hedge the risk of $580 Billion in long term commitments by seeking funds from public markets.
Make their shares more liquid. It makes it easier to do things like buy companies using stock or sell shares to fundraise. Your shares are worth less as a private company because whoever is getting them is going to have a hard time getting rid of them
Elon Musk gave Trump $290M.
Greg Brockman, OpenAI's president, gave Trump $25M.
Dario Amodei gave Trump a hard time.
Do the math...
The simplest explanation is, barring all else, usually the most likely.
It doesn't get much simpler than "Follow the money." You can bet the Trump administration will put up some bullshit obstacles to the Anthropic IPO that will have to be cleared up in court.
And what’s the math? OpenAI is not going public, Anthropic is, and the math is… the SEC will block the Anthropic IPO because of what exactly?
OpenAI is widely understood to be next in line to go public.
The SEC doesn't exist to play favourites. If Anthropic has broken a law they can be blocked for that. If not, then it would be unfair to them to block them for things that other companies with IPOs have done. Live by market primacy, die by market primacy.
All human endeavors play favorites. We shall see if the SEC will let lightning strike two times in one year.
Even if so, human endeavors like the SEC are supposed to play favorites according to specific, well-established rules. At that point, it becomes a bit of a stretch to call it "playing favorites".
Or, if you insist on keeping your claim, then when the SEC is playing "favorites", it's "the favorite set of rules", not favorite companies.
The concern is that “bad apples” get into indices and then that starts to rot people’s futures. I’m not sure how that will play out (indices can kick them out, or if the company really fails the market cap will reflect that and the index can “heal”). I’m guessing Enron was part of the index at some point, but we survived that.
Well as we already saw with SpaceX, indices are separate entities that are not fully controlled by the SEC. There are plenty of companies on the market that aren't in indices anyway, you don't need to block a company from the market to block it from the index.
People keep saying “bad apples into indices” but I have yet to truly understand what folks mean. Most of the mainstay indices would not include a fresh on the block new comer and it would generally need to follow other criteria. Yes SpaceX got added to the Nasdaq 100 but that is the whole purpose of that index. People should not be investing their savings in that.
What they mean is that when a company becomes part of an index, like the S&P500, historically, they come in somewhere around approximately rank 500. The S&P naturally results in more buying of winners and more selling of losers, so anyone who owns an S&P ETF will own that stock when its approximately rank 500, and will own more and more of it as it grows to be a bigger part of the index (higher rank).
Now, however, these IPOs are so big that straight away they're at like rank 10, or 15 or whatever. The investors who own the S&P don't experience any of the upside when they grow from rank 500 to 10. They are only exposed to the downside (if they lose value/rank/fall out of the index) or the marginal upside if they continue performing and generating returns.
The point is that given the size of the IPOs relative to other companies, their addition to the index has a much more downside exposure than reasonable upside exposure.
I'm probably butchering my explanation here, so apologies if it sounds odd.
Then that's an issue with the indexes isn't it.
The law is the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1913, among others, and it is intentionally incredibly vague when it comes to what counts as anticompetitive.
> Live by market primacy, die by market primacy.
The market is not functioning well for the average person, so we petition the state to do something about it.
Live by laissez faire, die by laissez faire
Many people, confuse free market with "laissez Faire". Or people who associate freedom with fewer rules, a common right wing rhetoric.
Another interpretation of freedom is the state guaranteeing the rights, and duties, of everyone. Directly it seems with more laws you have less freedom, but in a society with many opportunistic actors, this can lead to a balance that is actually more fair.
Of course it's nuanced, it's not just anarchy vs fascism. But in free markets, the state should at least uphold acceptable minimums to prevent abuse.
For sure, definitions are abused and we've lost nuance. For example, it is possible to live in a democracy which has an autocratic president.
I started a book last night (Markets, , and Community) which critiques both extremes (libertarian, democratic socialism) on economic and political policy, then attempts to persuade the reader that Market Socialism is something we should try, living up to the professed aims of both.
There’s plenty of argument about how if a company has an IPO then they are, by definition, part of the market. And if you bought an index fund that means to represent a part of the market that this company is in, then that company should be in the index fund.
You had lots of choices, you made this choice, and you can always change your mind. Do we really need to have the government step in to prevent you from having to choose something else?
Yes. There are too many people entire retirements on the line to hide behind the usual song and dance people do around this. What's the alternative. Let them proceed, the bubble burst, tank the market, then have the poorest and least equipped people to manage a recession just suffer? This is exactly what a government for the people could do. Or we could just keep letting rich assholes destroy everything with no consequences.
The poorest least equipped people don't have money in the market. Are you suggesting the SEC is capable of stopping a recession from occuring?
The "the usual song and dance people" of letting people choose what to do with their money. Sure bud.
Maybe the stock market shouldn’t be people’s retirements?
I never understand this argument.
You aren't required to invest in the stock market. There is nothing stopping you from exclusively investing in CD's, corporate bonds, Government bonds, or even cash for your retirement.
Of course those are less volatile, and therefore provide lower returns, hence you will need to save significantly more and spend significantly less, but that's not you being forced to invest in the stock market. That's just the reality of risk/return trade-offs.
Do you really expect to learn something that you don't already know by making Anthropic do two quarters of audited financials? What happens then? Come up with another reason for delay?
I won't be surprised if audit finds another few 100B of hidden debt
But would that change your opinion?
higher chance to recieve junk rating and reduced initial evaluation
Look, if it makes you feel better, I'm happy to state that I thought the SpaceX IPO price was too high and that it is probably still too high. But in the long run, it might turn out to be a great investment.
I believe that the Anthropic IPO price will be too high, but also in the long run it might turn out to be a great investment.
The most important thing I believe is that this is what I signed up for when I bought lots and lots of VTI. And that I can change to a different set of investments pretty much instantly for 9 hours a day, 5 days a week. With no tax hit because it's in my retirement account.
> I signed up for when I bought lots and lots of VTI. And that I can change to a different set of investments pretty much instantly for 9 hours a day
I don't think that's what avg 401k holder is doing
There is a difference between SoaceX and Anthropic. The former is objectively ahead of competitors by many years while Anthropic is at best by few months and pressure from open weights models is increasing.
So even if one believes in AI the rational choice is to invest into hardware that AI companies needs (GPUs, gas turbines, batteries, solar panels)
My opinion or the opinion of investors who trade individual stock?
> Do you really expect to learn something that you don't already know by making Anthropic do two quarters of audited financials?
Why do you think you don’t already have more than that many months of audited Anthropic financials?
> What's the alternative.
The alternative is don't invest in them?
Or, if you are this certain that they are going to fail, then short their stock. You could make millions.
Pretty gross seeing this kind of paternalistic view get so much agreement on HN. The "poorest and least equipped people" are invested in the stock market? Give me a break.
Quite.
The wealthiest Americans have never owned so much of the stock market, with the top 10% now holding a record 93% of US equities, according to Federal Reserve data.
the bottom 50% of Americans owned just 1% of all stocks and mutual fund shares
Don't buy shares of companies you don't like. Also don't buy etf and then cry about the companies included in the etf. Problem solved.
Don’t let them just suffer; teach them the joy of ANFO IEDs.
> There’s plenty of argument about how if a company has an IPO then they are, by definition, part of the market
By portfolio theory, all assets are part of the market. Public and private. The challenge is rebalancing cost, which is driven by transaction costs. Having a tiny percent of every single asset rebalanced every second is great in theory, since you'll be diversified across the market as a whole, but you'll also lose all your money to fees.
This is why the S&P 500 exists. It's a limited number of names that are very liquid, i.e. transactable at scale at reasonable cost. As trading fees went down we saw larger and larger indices.
As long as the S-1 is honest, the SEC is doing its job.
A real risk is the market cap, including insider holdings, being large enough to force the stock into major indices. That makes the stock a must-buy for index funds. That in turn props up the stock regardless of how crappy the financial position and how small the float. That was controversial when Space-X went public. It went into several major indices despite not really being that big in terms of revenue.
It felt a bit dishonest in that they pushed out their S-1 without Q3, and then it turns out Q3 revenue growth is decelerating (which they added in the recent addendum).
That being said, I don't think the government should be involved unless it's to unilaterally ban these "public" companies where shareholders do not have equal voting power with 'founders'.
If people want to invest, let them invest.
> felt a bit dishonest in that they pushed out their S-1 without Q3, and then it turns out Q3 revenue growth is decelerating
Why? Nobody is buying their shares without the opportunity to review both sets of data.
Over and over again they talk about how Anthropic's margins are getting squeezed. They're so squeezed in fact that Anthropic has merely 85% gross margins! They're earning merely $6 in revenue for every $1 they spend!
If they are earning $6 for every dollar spent why they are not profitable?
It's 85% gross margin only if you divide by "Compute and infrastructure", which does not include personnel, legal settlements, sales, marketing and partnerships, or other operating and administrative. Their total operating expenses (34Bn as of 30th September this year) is slightly higher than their revenue (33Bn as of 30th September this year) which means they have an operating loss of ~0.6Bn so far this year. The majority of the negative numbers lie in debt to Amazon and Google (72Bn + 8Bn other), which is actually mostly convertible notes that to my understanding are never going to be paid back as cash, but as stocks in the company. A valuation of 1-2 trillion would give them plenty of room to pay back that debt with stocks, so imo. that part is a little overblown. IPOing would directly help reduce these numbers.
The spending commitments the article mentions are a little more concerning, but I haven't looked into that so I'm currently taking that with a huge grain of salt (especially since the article felt very biased and politically motivated).
Not going to argue with the article on any front.
But when it comes to measuring productivity of transformational technology, a lot of things make that hard.
A lot of early use can be considered exploratory, whether it was intended to be or not. Meaning it was productive, but in a way that pays off down the road, not as much up front.
Not only are exploration payoffs not evident early, but they are also likely to be extremely high variance. Food for lots of "Well, of course it was a waste of time!" and "Well, of course it was going to pay off!" concurrent conclusions.
Then there is the fact that real productivity gains achieved early, may be the minority of wins, but are likely happening in places where they will grow very fast. At some point, they will "suddenly" appear and dwarf the losses.
But you don't find a lot of unexpected sweet spots if you don't throw the kitchen sink at them.
The SEC is less of a protective agency and more of a revenue-generating agency (in practice and to some degree in principle). If Anthropic does not go public, you have nothing to stop them from receiving private funding from sovereign wealth funds. You have to understand that the Vision Fund failure did not mean that overnight sovereign wealth funds stopped making money; they are desperate to invest in private companies, and if you look at some of the, ahh... "stories"... you do not see massive non-Western investment in AI companies yet. But they are sitting on a mountain of cash.
Moreover, every branch and division across the US government recognizes one thing... the public market is plateauing. It is not a numbers thing; it is a sentiment thing. The post-pandemic tech boom needs to continue, at least be stabilized. AI's expectation to hit the public market is largely keeping a lot of the momentum going.
If Anthropic does not enter the public market, it is going to be a major distressing event for SEC who make money from regulatory fees and a shit ton of fees from publicly listed companies. There is zero incentive to stop them. The SEC tries its best for the benefit of publicly listed companies, exchanges, brokers, institutional investors etc. who all benefit from the IPO.
Seems like requiring an audit might be the solution to this issue? Why they (or anybody) can go public, with financials that are little more than a pinky-swear, is beyond me.
What makes you think Anthropic isn’t audited?
That is something obvious to add on relevant public materials.
Like the S-1? Guess what’s in there…
The illiteracy financial influencers are promoting is worryingly apparent in this thread.
> That is something obvious to add on relevant public materials
Like the S-1? Where it clearly shows the auditor's opinion where it goes in every S-1? Because pretty much every company going public (through a IPO) in America needs to have audited financials [1].
[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/regulation_s-x
I think people were not satisfied with that one in S-1. It excludes this year completely and run-rate revenue and net revenue retention not verified, which is kinda big thing. They claim 900% NRR.
The article... The company’s financial results for 2026 have not been subjected to formal auditing, which makes them less-than-reliable...
:shrug:
They have been audited, it’s in the S-1.
The article... The company’s financial results for 2026 have not been subjected to formal auditing, which makes them less-than-reliable...
:shrug:
> Dig a little deeper, however, and a far bleaker picture emerges
If an online tech journalist can figure out this sort of thing, with the information available to him, maybe so can members of the investing public?
And the ones who don't are just going to be victims of their own greed anyway.
I think they should still go public, and it shouldn't be stopped.
To be honest, whether a company is operating well or not will become clear after it goes public.
At the same time, only with financial transparency can there be better supervision.
Also, this is one way for everyone to participate in AI construction and development to some extent.
I would buy some Anthropic stock. I don't care whether it goes up or down, but I want to be part of it, and I also use their products.
This author seems to be focused on if Anthropic will continue to grow and return value in the future. But it's disappointing that no one has questioned why they waited so long to go public. If they had gone public at a $100b evaluation, everyday people and pension funds could have invested in and seen the returns that AI has already delivered. Instead, Anthropic leadership runs around saying how AI need to benefit society as a whole rather than a select few, meanwhile they have kept the benefit of >$1t for themselves and refused to share it with others.
A year ago Anthropic was losing billions per year. I'm sure that if it had listed and then collapsed everyone would've gone "first they run around saying how AI needs to benefit society and then they dump a cash-burning company on pension funds"
Better to dump it when valuation is low instead of inflated.
But pension funds are already invested in them through the VC funds. The only difference is (more) people would be able to invest in Anthropic without paying management fees to middlemen.
Most 401ks and pension funds do not invest in pre IPO companies, this is just blatant misinformation
> Most 401ks and pension funds do not invest in pre IPO companies
Pensions do, individuals don’t.
“Less than 1% of the $14 trillion in assets in the defined contribution retirement system is invested in private markets, compared with approximately 24% for U.S. public pension funds and 17% for private pension funds as of 2023” [1].
[1] https://bipartisanpolicy.org/article/the-role-of-private-mar...
“Private markets” is not the same thing as pre-IPO companies
What market do you thinking pre-IPO companies occupy?
Like, I can tell you definitively pensions are pretty broadly invested in Anthropic specifically through a number of funds.
Who said anything about 401ks?
some pension funds definitely do
Aren't they still losing billions per year?
Even if they are losing money, if they went from $10b to $2t in evaluation, that's still $1.99t in value that has accrued to insiders rather than the general public.
Does inclusion in S&P 500 even happen fast enough after IPO to matter here, thought there was usually a wait period before index funds have to buy in?
No.
The SEC's obligation is to all market participants, not just index fund holders.
Arguably if you consciously choose to invest on a stock there should be no protection or obstacle other than regulated controls. For indices I see the point of extra protection. Where it gets murky is when you look at retirement funds, where you still have no control, but that should be regulation on the funds themselves rather than the stock.
And denying market participant's ability to invest or short one of the most important companies in the world would be malpractice
These days? All rules are maybe this or maybe that depending on political winds.
Frankly, no company should be allowed to IPO without showing steady profit. An exchange or index that promotes IPOs of unprofitable companies diminishes its reputation, and the reputation of all other stocks it indexes.
Anthropic is free to continue selling shares privately. They can setup a website and take cc payments if the care so much.
> Frankly, no company should be allowed to IPO without showing steady profit
This is directly counter to the original point of public markets at all
There are rules for raising money as a startup, namely Series A, B and C funding rounds. To participate in these rounds you need to be an accredited investor (meet specific income or net worth criteria set by the SEC) which insure that you can weather the storm.
12 month waiting period plus 4+ quarters of profitable earnings before you qualify for inclusion.
Signed with love, Sam.
—
In all seriousness, I get the argument that Anthropic is likely foisting a huge liability onto Americans via the ETFs in their retirement plans that’d pick up $AMADEO because it’ll be large cap. But if we’re gonna make that argument, it needs to be by sector or by risk class, not targeted at a single company.
The companies managing ETF's aren't stupid. A lot of them changed their rules to exclude SpaceX and may very well do so for Anthropic, if they feel that it is far too risky.
The only real argument here is that Anthropic has Q3 numbers but they aren't included in the prospectus because they may be bad. Delaying the IPO by a few weeks would solve that problem.
They already released the q3 numbers yesterday, right?
Ah, you're right. I didn't notice they updated the prospectus today.
Yep, and as was expected revenue growth is slowing down. But it was a bit shady they went out of their way to not include that in the initial S-1
> it was a bit shady they went out of their way to not include that in the initial S-1
This is such a bizarre thread. Did you know they're going to release Q4 results after the IPO? IPO buyers won't even know those numbers until after they buy! (Unlike the the Q3 figures.)
Reading the other articles on this site, it seems to be about pushing aggressive AI regulation and general AI doomerism?
If Anthropic can't easily pay all these commitments, what are the odds that they get all their creditors together and negotiate a mini chapter 11 (e.g. by adding 5 years to the commitment timelines, or canceling a proportion of each commitment)? The creditors have no interest in Anthropic going under, and with enough advanced notice, they can pause or cancel their own investments and probably take reduced losses.
I thought they were going to say, we have a duty to protect the public from the self-mutating swarms of artificial life about to explode onto our networks (as per the Astra/Qwen article on front page), but no, they meant the dubious VC finances!
No they shouldn't.
It's a "Junk stock". They should let it crash and burn.
Contractual commitments are not equivalent to debt.
> Multiple studies, including from organizations notable for their bullishness on AI, suggest LLMs are not accelerating productivity or otherwise generating positive returns on investment for most businesses.
Maybe this is true for most businesses, but that's because most businesses are not really leaning into agentic AI yet. It seems software devs started to use it in 2025 and OpenAI and Anthropic have tried expanding the use cases with their GUIs and webbased agentic systems, which I think means there is incredible growrth opportunity when the masses start adopting it.
It may take a few years though.
What a bad idea “let’s further empower a fickle federal gov to dictate the lives of citizens”
Oh but sure it’s for a good cause
Genuinely surprised they didn’t ask us to “think of the children”
I will support any politician whose sole purpose in life is torch AI companies.
The entire A.I. Bubble is one big scam with a few companies flooding the internet with positive reviews for their products and even buying entire companies to put a positive spin on use cases for their product. The Bun purchase comes to mind.
The canary was that these A.I. companies were investing in each other to pump up their stocks and keep them relevant. I would say this is borderline legal.
This is so dumb. Let the market figure it out. If it goes public and crashes, we get a valuable answer that saves tens of billions of wasted capital investment. If it floats, the dude who posts nonsense math can keep filling his subscriptions.
But we all know markets aren’t rational, I’m unconvinced we shouldn’t step in… if I started selling anthrax the government would try to stop me. This product might malfunction and show people how to make said anthrax which would be bad. Same with most things, everyone thinks this is a bubble. I think we should actually just put a cap on how much hardware data centres can buy per year, that would be the sensible solution tbh.
> if I started selling anthrax the government would try to stop me
Doing so by blocking you from going public while doing nothing about selling anthrax would be at approximate the level of this proposal's dumbness.
> we should actually just put a cap on how much hardware data centres can buy per year
Imagine if legislators had, in the 1980s, limited computer memory to 640 KB [1]?
[1] https://www.computerworld.com/article/1563853/the-640k-quote...
I go on to say the cap could be based on total hardware made to stop the prices from being crazy.
> say the cap could be based on total hardware made to stop the prices from being crazy
That's the policy priority you think we should be focussing on as a nation right now? GPU affordability?
Also, total hardware supply is a function of price. If prices don't go up production doesn't rise. At that point, the government decides who gets what quotas. How do you think that's going to go with our current regime?
Please edit the first sentence out. Keep it civil.
As far as your claim, it's fine to say let the market sort it out, but perhaps consider that pension funds and index funds now represent a market distortion that means anthropic crashing is harder and even if it does would happen after the mandatory purchases by the index funds which is basically a transfer from the public to the insiders at anthropic
Maybe the SEC should instead block funds from distorting the market by making large predictable transactions, then.
There's a 12 month waiting period plus the company has to show 4+ quarters of positive net earnings before qualifying to be included in the S&P 500. Pension and index funds are gonna be ok.
> mandatory purchases by the index funds
How many dollars do you think are forced to purchase these companies’ shares?
How will 'the market' figure it out when these companies have been directly angling for the too big to fail line? The end result is that they'll get a bailout due to national security interests or something so that the economy doesn't completely shit itself and then we're on the hook for it.
That's why people want the IPO to be blocked because we've seen what happens before.
> That's why people want the IPO to be blocked because we've seen what happens before
Why does OpenAI getting a bail-out depend on its registration status?
After the complete fraud that is SpaceX who cares what they do.
The sources in this article as so dubious. "ChicagoLand" Chicago chamber of commerce? A Tom's Hardware article from February of '26. Things have changed so much since February, it's not even funny to quote something so old. A bunch of the other articles are from 2025.
This is kind of desperate. The argument falls flat.
Are the pensions fund not "automatically" investing in anthropic as soon as it's public because it's in the S&P 500 (like spacex) ?
Spacex is not included in sp500 yet. Nasdaq is the one fast tracked spacex to dump on the retails
Many funds use Russel indexes, which included SpaceX already
Many funds use lots of indices. Very few dollars are being forced to buy these offerings.
Russel indexes are used by very large funds, e.g. vanguard usually track russel
Which Vanguard and at which weight?
the largest 2.3T is https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/VTI/ which tracks CSRP which fasttracked SPaceX
To be clear, while the CRSP fast tracked SpaceX’s admission to their total market index, that policy (which states that if a security's total market cap is larger than the breakpoint of the CRSP US Small Cap Index, it is can be added after 5 days of trading) has been in place for at least a decade. Unlike SpaceX’s admission to the Nasdaq, this did not represent a change in policy.
this article says crsp changed policy too: https://www.morningstar.com/funds/spacex-ipo-how-index-funds...
(FYI, CRSP doesn't exist anymore)
CRSP adjusted their methodology prior to SpaceX IPO being announced. It's part of a larger discussion about what the purpose of an index is and how people invest. Vanguard is not out to screw people's retirement up (quite the opposite really). Anyone is welcome to be part of the discussion, but it's hard to get anyone to take you seriously if you only come out of the woodwork when something "bad" is about to happen.
> (FYI, CRSP doesn't exist anymore)
it absolutely exists, but was renamed
> CRSP adjusted their methodology prior to SpaceX IPO being announced.
important part is when SpaceX ipo plans were decided, not announced to clueless public
How many marginal dollars from that went into SpaceX?
The index drama was mostly a creation of influencers.
so you saying you know exact number affected by index drama, and it is small? What is that?
> you saying you know exact number affected by index drama, and it is small? What is that?
I'm not doing it again for Anthropic. The finance/crypto influencers have clearly found a pitch that entertains.
For SpaceX, $5bn of U.S. funds and $9bn globally were "forced" to buy [1]. Out of $200bn total buying over the first three days [2] and like $45 trillion of index assets in America alone [3].
[1] https://www.pouyabehmaram.com/articles/spacex-forced-buying
[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/18/5-wild-spacex-stats-from-the...
[3] https://www.ici.org/system/files/2026-04/2026-factbook-quick...
mechanical buying in your link is 17.5B for initial 555M shares. 9nb is some creative napkin math.
Now, since than, spacex float increased from 555M shares to 4.3B.
> mechanical buying in your link is 17.5B
No, that's the upper end of what it could possibly be. It's what would happen if every manager in the first days after the IPO immediately bought the share. Most indices don't work that way, they rebalance over time, in part to avoid this sort of crowding. (They also have latitude to accept and reject index specifics, e.g. around buying new issues.) Managing tracking error against transaction cost is the whole business of passive management.
Also, let's use $17bn in forced buying–globally–and $12bn domestically. That's just not enough to move anything. It's also a vanishing percentage of total index assets. You're again talking about 0.04% of index assets going to what remains a multi-trillion dollar asset.
> spacex float increased from 555M shares to 4.3B
How is this relevant to the argument?
> How is this relevant to the argument?
it multiplies your numbers by factor 8.
> That's just not enough to move anything. It's also a vanishing percentage of total index assets.
the question is that its bunch of dudes dipped into unqualified investors savings
> it multiplies your numbers by factor 8
How? Which index 8x'd its SpaceX weight because float went up?
> the question is that its bunch of dudes dipped into unqualified investors savings
Unqualified investors? What are you referring to?
There are people who really want this to be a massive scam. And sure, you could argue that like two idiots who didn't know how indices work got duped. But you can't argue it was massive, either in capital-markets scales or even within the scale of the IPO.
Instead what I've seen is a bunch of financial influencers blowing a curiosity out of proportion and then doubling down with misinformation while a bunch of people traded into and out of indices for no particular reason.
> But you can't argue it was massive, either in capital-markets scales or even within the scale of the IPO.
I argue, its up to you if you accept it.
The Russell indices, and other indices like the CRSP total market index, might include newly public companies like SpaceX, but the relative weight of them in the index will be float-adjusted, so a company like SpaceX that has kept a lot of its shares locked up will be underrepresented in the index compared to a more established public company.
Per https://www.tradingview.com/symbols/NASDAQ-SPCX/ SpaceX curreng float is 4.29B shares or about 600B USD, not that small grab from pension funds.
its like 2.5% of nasdaq. any crsp tracking fund would be 0.2%
I think all mentioned numbers: 2.5% of Nasdaq, 0.8% (as per market cap from https://indexes.morningstar.com/indexes/details/morningstar-...) of crsp, 600B usd are large enough to just give them to trillioners.
The S&P 500 denied early admission to SpaceX.
There's a 12 month waiting period plus the company has to show 4+ quarters of positive net earnings before qualifying to be included.
Why does this matter?
Just distill their models completely. They have no moral high-ground at all there.
The insiders at the top won’t allow it…
I'm sorry, evacuate? In our moment of triumph?
lol at this article. The Machiavellian ethics of tech
It's going to get hammered into oblivion long before it gets to where it can end up on sp500. The election, and what happens after may see them delaying the IPO (if I was one to bet)
But it also sort of doesn't matter. Anthropic, not in sp500, ends up a fail then the "bubble" pops and the sp500 gets ugly.
Why do you think they will delay the IPO? I bet there's enough demand to buy their stock.
> if I was one to bet
You can do exactly that on Polymarket and make good money if you are right.
The SEC should SEC to protect the public.