There is a mad rush to get these IPOs out the door before the market sneezes.
roadside_picnic 44 minutes ago [-]
It's more insidious than that. These IPOs aren't being rushed, they were waiting for all the pieces to be in place to force 401ks and other retirement plans to buy these IPOs.
The most recent change was the NASDAQ adopting the "fast change rule" which allows newly IPO'd companies to be listed in the index after only 15 days of trading. This rule was decided March 30, 2026 and only came into effect May 1, 2026.
The plan is to rapidly drive these prices up in the first 15 days, get the companies listed in the NASDAQ so funds are forced to purchase them at higher prices, then leave retirement accounts holding the bag.
chinathrow 30 minutes ago [-]
How do these people sleep at night coming up with schemes like that?
noelsusman 24 minutes ago [-]
Very few 401ks offer the NASDAQ 100 as an investment option. Last I checked it was <1%.
giarc 28 minutes ago [-]
I get the sentiment that this is unscrupulous, however, isn't 15 days enough time to find the right price? Or will that not really happen until first quarterly earnings report, which will not occur within that 15 day window?
iTokio 7 minutes ago [-]
No, IPO pops, and honey moon periods are common.
And there are plenty of ways to manipulate the price, such as issuing a low float to a hyper hyped stock..
FireBeyond 7 minutes ago [-]
I mean the goal is that you have multiple earnings report to show sustainability.
Meanwhile some of these companies are also lobbying to be able to only have to submit annual or biannual earnings reports, too.
Everyone is looking for multiple ways to leave the dumb money holding the bag.
FireBeyond 12 minutes ago [-]
Very true. Anthropic just raised money at the end of last week.
There's no way they could have done that without telling those investors the S-1 was prepared and awaiting their signature on the round before they hit Submit, so to speak.
cdelsolar 26 minutes ago [-]
If you believe this is going to happen you can change the allocations of your retirement plans.
bittercynic 9 minutes ago [-]
You can protect yourself, but many won't be aware of the situation until it's too late, and institutionally managed funds won't be able to change their rules in time to avoid holding these as part of the index funds they hold.
gonzalohm 52 minutes ago [-]
And oh boy do they make sure everyone knows that they are doing an IPO
neovive 58 minutes ago [-]
If OpenAI and Anthropic eventually become public companies with trillion-dollar valuations, it will be interesting to see if their company ethos remains the same. With that much purchasing power, it's very tempting to gobble up competitors and raise prices.
johnQdeveloper 29 minutes ago [-]
They already do both.
The real competition is coming out of China right now and I doubt the Chinese government is going to let them buy out their "fast follower" AI companies that are consistently 6-12 months behind in terms of quality. That said, I'm factoring quality as in Opus 4.5/Sonnet 4.5/GPT-5.5 as break points since I haven't really seen an improvement since that point when using AI.
fieldcny 13 minutes ago [-]
You speak so authoritatively about quality and performance of these models, yet there are no quantitative metrics that correlate to real world outcomes that indicate that the quality and performance of these models is anything but subjective noise and classic benchmark nonsense.
A company consumed half a billion dollars worth of tokens in a month and nobody noticed anything until the bill came due.
Tha $500m dollars is roughly equivalent to 2000 people working for a year or 500 people working for four years, they can and would accomplish a lot if they worked in companies that add value to the economy by solving real problems.
herpdyderp 54 minutes ago [-]
The question is not "if" they will lose their ethos but "how long will it take".
pton_xd 40 minutes ago [-]
If "Open AI" was their ethos, it was lost immediately. I'm not sure what the ethos of Anthropic is.
Arubis 20 minutes ago [-]
I gather most of the ethos behind Anthropic is "we don't want to work with Sam".
mirekrusin 13 minutes ago [-]
Go public so everybody can benefit?
daseiner1 55 minutes ago [-]
corporate pursuit of monopoly is as sure a phenomenon as gravity
CompoundEyes 31 minutes ago [-]
I’m curious which labs will start producing hardware be it robotics, consumer or commercial devices, chips, energy infrastructure or transforming shipping crates into housing for displaced and jobless humans. O_o
blmarket 52 minutes ago [-]
IPO won't lose their ethos. Competition out from their duopoly will.
seanp2k2 34 minutes ago [-]
Who else right now is making competing models that are roughly as capable? Now factor in hardware availability / future delivery contracts and capital requirements for building datacenters and running new training. If you're trying to compete and lease all that with VC money or loans, good luck actually competing.
2OEH8eoCRo0 20 minutes ago [-]
There is significant first-mover advantage for torching your ethos.
pqtyw 53 minutes ago [-]
> if their company ethos remains the same.
What? In what way would the change? They are already raising prices..
ozgrakkurt 17 minutes ago [-]
what is their company ethos? They are some of the most despicable tech companies in my opinion.
ParkRanger 24 seconds ago [-]
Who’s going out of the gate first, Anthropic or Space X. Sequencing probably matters more than it should.
thomascountz 57 minutes ago [-]
SpaceX submitted an amendment to their S-1 today[1]
And as suspected, the Anthropic deal is not recurring revenue, its just a think they can cancel anytime with 90 days notice...Release the bad news slowly and when people are looking somewhere else...
SpaceX AI segment lost about $2.5B from operations in Q1 2026 on $818M revenue...they are burning dollars. Musk controls about 85% of voting power through supervoting shares, and cannot be fired...go IPO buyers...nothing like economic exposure without control....
onlyrealcuzzo 56 minutes ago [-]
Are we in a race to see who can pop the bubble first?
FuckButtons 48 minutes ago [-]
They all know it’s coming, if it pops before they ipo then they don’t get their billion dollar payday, they have every incentive to move quickly.
boringg 1 minutes ago [-]
FYI they have about a 365 day lockup after IPO before the execs can sell.
roadside_picnic 49 minutes ago [-]
As you likely know, rules have recently been changed that basically force many 401k funds to invest in these IPOs while simultaneously having a relatively small number of the initial IPO to be sold to the public forcing the funds to by at inflated prices.
The bubble won't pop until these retirement accounts of have been raided.
40acres 38 minutes ago [-]
After years of companies refusing to go public (looking at you Stripe), it's almost refreshing to see a hyped tech go actually IPO.
parthdesai 26 minutes ago [-]
Is it actually refreshing? It's actually refreshing to see Stripe staying private for so long. That means, they have a sustainable business model, and can take on projects that might benefit users in the long term despite negative short term consequences instead of focus on growing at all cost for the most part.
mcast 6 minutes ago [-]
Stripe seems to be doing fairly well as a private company. They continually offer liquidity events for employees to cash out, while also retaining less pressure for hypergrowth from outside activists and investors.
freediddy 1 hours ago [-]
This is the first time I've seen a Public, Confidential S-1 filing.
Maxatar 49 minutes ago [-]
It's the contents of the submission that are confidential, not the fact that they are submitting.
The contents themselves contain a lot of detailed information about the internals of the company including financials, revenue, ownership details etc... those details are what's confidential until the SEC gives its approval, at which point the public can then review the document.
outside1234 42 minutes ago [-]
What this means it that it won't survive scrutiny, so better hide it so that there is only a small amount of time to do it.
jmtulloss 31 minutes ago [-]
Why do you think this? Confidential filings before an IPO are standard practice.
Sol- 1 hours ago [-]
I suppose they announced it because the fact that they submitted it would leak anyway.
iLoveOncall 50 minutes ago [-]
That's how you know it's purely marketing and they're not actually going public.
0123456789ABCDE 42 minutes ago [-]
excuse me. what am i being sold, in this so called marketing?
iLoveOncall 35 minutes ago [-]
You? Nothing. Private investors? The dream of an IPO.
0123456789ABCDE 11 minutes ago [-]
they closed series h, last thursday†. what are you on about?
Given how often these get leaked (see Palantir + SpaceX) and the cost of preparation, why would you ever file an S-1 unless you were serious?
iLoveOncall 34 minutes ago [-]
Because you want another funding round but you will get it only if investors think they're going to get their money back soon.
sschueller 49 minutes ago [-]
Where will it be listed? I am considering selling all my index ETFs in those markets until the this blows over.
barbazoo 15 minutes ago [-]
I've heard of the changes to the NASDAQ rules and I somewhat get how they make it so these stocks are included in index funds earlier than before. As far as I know, NYSE and others haven't done the same change so index funds there are "safe", i.e. will include the stocks only after a longer period, implying that it will have settled in value by then. Is that true at all? I'm sure the situation is much more complicated, but I do wonder how to figure out how much I'm affected.
lbrandy 7 minutes ago [-]
There is a huge amount of misinformation on this topic, including in this thread, at the minute.
Some index funds have a very long horizon before they include them (e.g. a year). Others are "fast-tracked" (e.g. notably VTI). Most of those, however, are float-adjusted, so only the stock available for trade is considered part of the marketcap. So e.g. VTI / VTSAX will buy spacex relatively quickly after the IPO but at the float-adjusted weight of ~$75B because that's the % of stock available.
If you care alot about this, now is the time to understand how your index fund treats IPOs wrt to delays + float adjustment.
PUSH_AX 46 minutes ago [-]
Time in market > timing the market.
rottencupcakes 30 minutes ago [-]
It's this sort of mentality and the prolitferation of passive investing that gives these companies the opportunity to pass the bag.
PUSH_AX 19 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
ch4s3 1 hours ago [-]
I'm curious to know if they generated this with Claude and what the prompt looked like.
ssgodderidge 1 hours ago [-]
Can someone help me understand how its "confidential" if they blog about it? Perhaps they simply mean the details of the S-1 are confidential for now?
kylecazar 1 hours ago [-]
The contents are confidential. They are just announcing they submitted it.
ConnorBoyd 1 hours ago [-]
The S-1 itself isn't made public in a confidential filing.
general_reveal 1 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
tonyoconnell 1 hours ago [-]
so we shouldn't talk to humans when an ai can give an answer?
general_reveal 59 minutes ago [-]
If you have access to a Xeon processor, I don’t see why humans should be the first thing you interface with.
59 minutes ago [-]
cdrnsf 1 hours ago [-]
We should always talk to humans.
eamag 42 minutes ago [-]
why did they raise 3 days ago? What's the benefit of doing this instead of going public right away? If it's just cash to pay for GPUs, can't they issue bonds or something?
Maxatar 32 minutes ago [-]
You pretty much always do a late-stage private round shortly before an IPO, that is the standard. The goal of the late-stage funding round is to give a better idea of how much capital can be raised by the IPO. It helps reduce uncertainty about expectations of what the company is worth before going public.
44df 37 minutes ago [-]
Pump up the valuation baby.
Price setting.
gedy 32 minutes ago [-]
IPO isn't really about "raising money for the company" any longer, unless one means raising the money in their wallets so they can take the money and run.
chinathrow 1 hours ago [-]
Expect the token price to correlate with the stock price.
hubraumhugo 1 hours ago [-]
With SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic, we're likely to see 3 of the largest IPOs ever (by a wide margin) this year. Will existing institutional investors trim other positions to allocate a lot of capital for these mega listings or is this not a concern?
thewebguyd 10 minutes ago [-]
Most likely. Funds generally don't have much unallocated cash, they operate fully invested, so three huge IPOs will force an asset rebalancing which can cause some liquidity drain from the rest of the market.
Plus as insider lockup periods expire, that's a ton of dollars pulled out of the market and into safer assets. It's going to be a huge net exit of capital.
I'd expect a lot of volatility and pretty heavy downward pressure across the rest of tech.
nemomarx 58 minutes ago [-]
At least all the index funds are obligated to, right?
qwytw 49 minutes ago [-]
Based on current rules they wouldn't included in the S&P 500 for at least several years even based on optimistic scenarios.
Of course IIRC they looking into tweaking the rules to allow some handpicked extremely unprofitable companies in, due to "reasons"....
bluGill 45 minutes ago [-]
Maybe. If you read the fine print they are not. They have the goal of matching the index returns, but they never say anywhere they have exactly the stocks in the index.
Index funds all make active choices and often hold companies not in the original index. They are more passive than a traditional funds that buys and sells all the time, but they still make active choices. When an index changes stocks they can look up the price - but the funds mirroring the index need to make real trades that if not carefully done will change the value of the stocks (and cause the fund to under perform the index), so index funds have plans to prevent this. Compared to a traditional fund an index fund looks passive and there is much much less for the manager to do - but that doesn't mean the managers do nothing.
chilipepperhott 52 minutes ago [-]
Most index funds wait for at least a year before adding a new listing. The only exception that I'm aware of is QQQ and SpaceX.
qwytw 49 minutes ago [-]
Technically they couldn't be added to the S&P 500 etc. until they become profitable.
nemomarx 38 minutes ago [-]
If space x gets an exception, why wouldn't anthropic?
nly 52 minutes ago [-]
Index funds follow indices and often only rebalance quarterly
DenisM 49 minutes ago [-]
company must have a history of profitability before being included in the S&P 500
whateveracct 57 minutes ago [-]
you and me will all be left holding a small cut of the bag
outside1234 40 minutes ago [-]
But only the amount the company floats for many index funds. So in the case of SpaceX, they are only floating 5% of the company. So the number of shares something like VTI has to buy is much smaller than the total market cap (5% of it).
The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.
dgellow 43 minutes ago [-]
Shorting when there is a mania is way, way too risky
baal80spam 51 minutes ago [-]
> Time to short the market. We are at peak bubble.
I've seen this comment on HN at least 5 times already.
43 minutes ago [-]
rvz 55 minutes ago [-]
This is actually the pin everyone was looking for that will pop this AI bubble, including the token cost falling in China and the release of open models that are good and run locally.
bensyverson 50 minutes ago [-]
It could be, but the market could bounce right back. And if it does, it's hard to know who will emerge stronger. Anthropic could end up like Amazon, or it could end up like Yahoo.
bjtitus 45 minutes ago [-]
Where are these open models that are as good as GPT and Claude and run locally?
outside1234 43 minutes ago [-]
Got to dump this on everyone's SP 500 index fund before people figure out that there is a 95% drop in token usage when they are metered.
thewebguyd 7 minutes ago [-]
S&P 500 requires trailing 12 month profitability to be on the index. We won't see any of these on the S&P for at least a year or more.
dcre 42 minutes ago [-]
They are metered. That's why their ARR went from $9B to $45B in 6 months.
kypro 59 minutes ago [-]
What does it mean to submit confidentially – what's the process there? I assume it be made public when approved by the SEC?
Maxatar 52 minutes ago [-]
It means that Anthropic has submitted a document that it intends to share with the public in order to solicit public investment. This document includes details about its business, financials/revenue, ownership structure, risks, etc...
The document itself is what's confidential until the SEC approves it, at which point Anthropic will release that document to the public and IPO.
rvz 1 hours ago [-]
Of course that fundraise was the last one: [0], everyone getting ready to dump their pre-IPO shares on to you as China catches up with their open models.
Better to do it now than to wait a day longer and the tokens are not getting any cheaper here.
Obviously OpenAI will file for IPO certainly this month, or even this week in response both SpaceX, and Anthropic.
Every post anthropic generates feels like misdirection and bad summarization using AI. There is no sense of who the audience for this post is for and includes a lot of redundant information.
Maxatar 59 minutes ago [-]
Can't see the relevance of this comment to the post. You can do a Google search for "confidentially submits draft S-1 to the SEC" to see other examples of companies announcing these submissions and they're all written in the same way.
It's just a standard/template that most companies reuse.
> This announcement is being published under Rule 135 of the Securities Act of 1933
It's a required public disclosure following a format traditionally used in mandatory public disclosures.
nemomarx 59 minutes ago [-]
Is there any real reason to have generated announcements anyway? You could get more polished text with some copy editors and I can't imagine cost is really a big concern for it.
luka598 44 minutes ago [-]
It is possible that they are dogfooding
Catloafdev 57 minutes ago [-]
It's a legal notice, what are you talking about?
Rendered at 17:11:40 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
The most recent change was the NASDAQ adopting the "fast change rule" which allows newly IPO'd companies to be listed in the index after only 15 days of trading. This rule was decided March 30, 2026 and only came into effect May 1, 2026.
The plan is to rapidly drive these prices up in the first 15 days, get the companies listed in the NASDAQ so funds are forced to purchase them at higher prices, then leave retirement accounts holding the bag.
And there are plenty of ways to manipulate the price, such as issuing a low float to a hyper hyped stock..
Meanwhile some of these companies are also lobbying to be able to only have to submit annual or biannual earnings reports, too.
Everyone is looking for multiple ways to leave the dumb money holding the bag.
There's no way they could have done that without telling those investors the S-1 was prepared and awaiting their signature on the round before they hit Submit, so to speak.
The real competition is coming out of China right now and I doubt the Chinese government is going to let them buy out their "fast follower" AI companies that are consistently 6-12 months behind in terms of quality. That said, I'm factoring quality as in Opus 4.5/Sonnet 4.5/GPT-5.5 as break points since I haven't really seen an improvement since that point when using AI.
A company consumed half a billion dollars worth of tokens in a month and nobody noticed anything until the bill came due.
Tha $500m dollars is roughly equivalent to 2000 people working for a year or 500 people working for four years, they can and would accomplish a lot if they worked in companies that add value to the economy by solving real problems.
What? In what way would the change? They are already raising prices..
[1]: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1181412/000162828026...
SpaceX AI segment lost about $2.5B from operations in Q1 2026 on $818M revenue...they are burning dollars. Musk controls about 85% of voting power through supervoting shares, and cannot be fired...go IPO buyers...nothing like economic exposure without control....
The bubble won't pop until these retirement accounts of have been raided.
The contents themselves contain a lot of detailed information about the internals of the company including financials, revenue, ownership details etc... those details are what's confidential until the SEC gives its approval, at which point the public can then review the document.
† https://www.anthropic.com/news/series-h
Some index funds have a very long horizon before they include them (e.g. a year). Others are "fast-tracked" (e.g. notably VTI). Most of those, however, are float-adjusted, so only the stock available for trade is considered part of the marketcap. So e.g. VTI / VTSAX will buy spacex relatively quickly after the IPO but at the float-adjusted weight of ~$75B because that's the % of stock available.
If you care alot about this, now is the time to understand how your index fund treats IPOs wrt to delays + float adjustment.
Price setting.
Plus as insider lockup periods expire, that's a ton of dollars pulled out of the market and into safer assets. It's going to be a huge net exit of capital.
I'd expect a lot of volatility and pretty heavy downward pressure across the rest of tech.
Of course IIRC they looking into tweaking the rules to allow some handpicked extremely unprofitable companies in, due to "reasons"....
Index funds all make active choices and often hold companies not in the original index. They are more passive than a traditional funds that buys and sells all the time, but they still make active choices. When an index changes stocks they can look up the price - but the funds mirroring the index need to make real trades that if not carefully done will change the value of the stocks (and cause the fund to under perform the index), so index funds have plans to prevent this. Compared to a traditional fund an index fund looks passive and there is much much less for the manager to do - but that doesn't mean the managers do nothing.
"The stock market just did something eerily similar to the dot-com bubble top in 2000" - https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/01/the-stock-market-just-did-so...
I've seen this comment on HN at least 5 times already.
The document itself is what's confidential until the SEC approves it, at which point Anthropic will release that document to the public and IPO.
Better to do it now than to wait a day longer and the tokens are not getting any cheaper here.
Obviously OpenAI will file for IPO certainly this month, or even this week in response both SpaceX, and Anthropic.
Then AGI will then have been achieved externally.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48313390
It's just a standard/template that most companies reuse.
https://www.figma.com/blog/s1-confidential-submission
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/gemini-announces-co...
https://investors.navan.com/news-releases/news-release-detai...
https://www.round1-group.co.jp/docs/pdf/2026/20260507_news_e...
It's a required public disclosure following a format traditionally used in mandatory public disclosures.