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.
fpoling 2 hours ago [-]
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.
roenxi 2 hours ago [-]
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.
ponector 20 minutes ago [-]
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.
conartist6 55 minutes ago [-]
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
0xDEAFBEAD 41 minutes ago [-]
>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?
skissane 2 hours ago [-]
> 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.
sumo89 45 minutes ago [-]
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.
vanviegen 1 hours ago [-]
> 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. :-)
throwthrowuknow 56 minutes ago [-]
> if enough people do what you're planning to do, the market is basically broken
First time?
Waterluvian 9 hours ago [-]
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.
whimsicalism 9 hours ago [-]
Agreed, so also don't bailout.
miki123211 2 hours ago [-]
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.
mikelitoris 5 hours ago [-]
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bulbar 4 hours ago [-]
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crtified 2 hours ago [-]
Primarily, other rich people - waiting keenly in the wings for the Buy Signal.
Because the nature of this whole thing is a cycle. The worst of it is that the consequences echo downwards until they hit social strata that can't handle any loss (because they have little). That's where the social cost really beds in, in the thousands and millions of ruined lives of ordinary people that are the collateral damage each time there's a failed round of the RL Investment Board Game funded by the world's wealthiest 10%.
2 hours ago [-]
bonzini 4 hours ago [-]
NVIDIA has such a huge market cap that it would affect every stock ETF or pension fund, not to mention the domino effects.
repeekad 3 hours ago [-]
Which proportionately affects those with large investments, removing growth that was speculative in the first place, meanwhile bailouts are paid by tax payers.
tjwebbnorfolk 2 hours ago [-]
It also affects unionized firefighters and teachers with pensions.
If a multi-millionaire loses 50% of their net worth, they are still a multi-millionaire. When normal people lose 50% of their net worth, they have real problems.
Not arguing for a bailout, but the "it mainly hurts rich people" argument is pretty weak, and may actually be backward.
deaux 2 hours ago [-]
The hundreds of billions - in this case potentially trillion+ - of dollars not spent on bailing them out can be distributed to such pension funds instead, if that's truly the best avenue. These funds should already be very diversified in the firstly place.
Not bailing out absolutely primarily hurts rich people. This is trivial to ascertain from basic principles.
deaux 2 hours ago [-]
Bailouts also affect everyone and have even worse domino effects.
verdverm 3 hours ago [-]
the general issue is that many other people will be exposed through index funds that will have to buy into a dubious company
usefulcat 9 hours ago [-]
Agreed. However, “the government” is very much not a monolithic entity.
mapme 8 hours ago [-]
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.
dathery 7 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
sumedh 6 hours ago [-]
> 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.
AnthonyMouse 4 hours ago [-]
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.
parineum 4 hours ago [-]
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.
deaux 2 hours ago [-]
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!
DangitBobby 7 hours ago [-]
Were the normal people who lost everything ever bailed out?
parineum 3 hours ago [-]
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.
gimlichgu 1 hours ago [-]
And the massive corporations that bought bad debt? I guess those poor bastards probably couldn't have known any better
sumo89 44 minutes ago [-]
"lying about their incomes"
What? Say you don't understand the prime mortgage bubble without saying it.
ab5tract 3 hours ago [-]
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.
deaux 2 hours ago [-]
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.
adventured 7 hours ago [-]
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.
0x4e 7 hours ago [-]
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?
deaux 2 hours ago [-]
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.
CalRobert 6 hours ago [-]
"Depression of value" aka "making housing more affordable".
forgetfreeman 7 hours ago [-]
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za_creature 9 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
bdcravens 4 hours ago [-]
Whoever owns shares.
shimman 8 hours ago [-]
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).
JumpCrisscross 6 hours ago [-]
> government is obligated to do what society wants
Not how the rule of law works!
FuckButtons 5 hours ago [-]
So government has no obligation to rule by and for the people in your mind?
JumpCrisscross 5 hours ago [-]
> government has no obligation to rule by and for the people in your mind?
Literally nobody said this.
bulbar 4 hours ago [-]
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.
tjwebbnorfolk 2 hours ago [-]
Rule of law literally means that the law is the ruler, not government.
littlecosmic 6 hours ago [-]
Can always make a new law, or edit an existing one…
JumpCrisscross 6 hours ago [-]
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.
bix6 10 hours ago [-]
The SEC should adjudicate more. The entire SPAC era should never have happened.
tclarke142 7 hours ago [-]
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.
chollida1 7 hours ago [-]
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.
5 hours ago [-]
chews 9 hours ago [-]
Chamath thinks otherwise.
thevillagechief 9 hours ago [-]
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.
chews 7 hours ago [-]
Making the carry and fees to unwind a lockup that effectively does nothing is really really profitable.
maxerickson 8 hours ago [-]
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.
infecto 8 hours ago [-]
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.
dvt 8 hours ago [-]
> 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.
maxerickson 8 hours ago [-]
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.
namibj 6 hours ago [-]
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.
bickfordb 7 hours ago [-]
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.
andsoitis 3 hours ago [-]
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CrimsonRain 7 hours ago [-]
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.
gerdesj 10 hours ago [-]
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."
kasey_junk 10 hours ago [-]
Note what that explicitly doesn’t say. Any decisions about good or bad investments.
JacobAsmuth 10 hours ago [-]
Unless you're accusing Anthropic of misconduct in their financial reporting obligations I fail to see the connection.
eqvinox 8 hours ago [-]
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.
czinck 8 hours ago [-]
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"
eqvinox 7 hours ago [-]
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.
JumpCrisscross 6 hours ago [-]
> random IPO stock buyer
Public-stock buyer or IPO buyer? The latter tend to be sophisticated.
joshuamorton 6 hours ago [-]
> 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.
jacquesm 6 hours ago [-]
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.
neltnerb 4 hours ago [-]
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.
AnthonyMouse 4 hours ago [-]
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.
bix6 10 hours ago [-]
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?
> “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.
bix6 5 hours ago [-]
I was referring to their schedule of obligations aka all the money they’ve promised to pay other people for compute.
what 8 hours ago [-]
> 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?
Anon1096 7 hours ago [-]
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.
5 hours ago [-]
what 7 hours ago [-]
What industries use 13 months of 28 days for financial reporting?
kasey_junk 3 hours ago [-]
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.
adgjlsfhk1 8 hours ago [-]
28*13=364. Months are different sizes so month*12 would be an over-estimate
what 8 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
sdenton4 7 hours ago [-]
The year with 372 days has lower daily consumption spending than the year with 364 days... What are you even.
what 7 hours ago [-]
Um what? You seem confused, they didn’t measure a year with 372 or even 364 days. They measured 28 days. And it’s almost a certainty that taking the average spend over the last 28 days and multiplying by 13 is higher than taking the average spend over the last 31 days and multiplying by 12. Especially if we believe their revenue growth numbers.
JumpCrisscross 7 hours ago [-]
> it’s almost a certainty that taking the average spend over the last 28 days and multiplying by 13 is higher than taking the average spend over the last 31 days and multiplying by 12
This is generally true of any growing time series. If you don't want this look at the audited GAAP figures.
lgfrbcsgo 8 hours ago [-]
The year has 52 weeks. 28 days is 4 weeks. 13*4=52
joshuamorton 6 hours ago [-]
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.
jobs_throwaway 8 hours ago [-]
~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
5 hours ago [-]
bananamogul 8 hours ago [-]
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.
losvedir 9 hours ago [-]
It's totally normal for companies to release their own take on the numbers alongside GAAP ones.
jeremyjh 9 hours ago [-]
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.
stingraycharles 8 hours ago [-]
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.
sbseitz 7 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
_heimdall 8 hours ago [-]
Informed consent is extremely important. Its also exceedingly rare today, and the pandemic response didn't help.
warkdarrior 8 hours ago [-]
How did the pandemic response affect informed consent in the IPO market?
bryan_w 7 hours ago [-]
People are really playing madlibs in the comment section these days, sadly
rdiddly 2 hours ago [-]
The argument is based on visibility.
int32_64 6 hours ago [-]
>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.
JumpCrisscross 6 hours ago [-]
> 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?
Joel_Mckay 9 hours ago [-]
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
cma 9 hours ago [-]
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.
ashkankiani 5 hours ago [-]
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?
jakobnissen 5 hours ago [-]
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”
alexashka 9 hours ago [-]
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.
cornell532 9 hours ago [-]
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
darig 9 hours ago [-]
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titanomachy 11 hours ago [-]
> 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.
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.
jmtulloss 10 hours ago [-]
If you are not looking at Claude usage then a plateau amongst Claude competitors in late 2025 makes perfect sense.
zahlman 3 hours ago [-]
Sure, but "not looking at Claude usage" is a bizarre strategy when it's being incorporated into an argument against Anthropic's IPO.
> 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.
gruez 10 hours ago [-]
"ai use remained relatively steady" =/= "Americans using AI at work fell significantly "
forbiddenvoid 10 hours ago [-]
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.
smrtinsert 6 hours ago [-]
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.
Aurornis 9 hours ago [-]
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.
IsTom 1 hours ago [-]
> 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.
ecommerceguy 10 hours ago [-]
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.
leptons 10 hours ago [-]
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.
kakacik 1 hours ago [-]
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
rrr_oh_man 9 minutes ago [-]
Sounds like president material to me
antaviana 10 hours ago [-]
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.
claytongulick 9 hours ago [-]
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.
R_D_Olivaw 7 hours ago [-]
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)
sjdh76 9 hours ago [-]
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.
tbrownaw 10 hours ago [-]
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?
loeg 8 hours ago [-]
Anecdotally, I didn't start using AI at work until after summer 2025, and now it's essential.
giancarlostoro 9 hours ago [-]
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.
Bender 10 hours ago [-]
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.
Jedd 10 hours ago [-]
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.
stingraycharles 11 hours ago [-]
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.
CamperBob2 10 hours ago [-]
Elon Musk gave Trump $290M.
Greg Brockman, OpenAI's president, gave Trump $25M.
Dario Amodei gave Trump a hard time.
Do the math...
lopsotronic 8 hours ago [-]
The simplest explanation is, barring all else, usually the most likely.
CamperBob2 6 hours ago [-]
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.
stingraycharles 7 hours ago [-]
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?
CamperBob2 5 hours ago [-]
OpenAI is widely understood to be next in line to go public.
applebottomjean 11 hours ago [-]
If companies were already profitable why would they go public?
stingraycharles 11 hours ago [-]
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.
vikramkr 4 hours ago [-]
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
ben_w 10 hours ago [-]
Same reason they take private investments or loans: To grow faster than would be possible without that.
stingraycharles 8 hours ago [-]
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.
qeternity 1 hours ago [-]
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?
chollida1 7 hours ago [-]
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:)
sailfast 8 hours ago [-]
Clearly to hedge the risk of $580 Billion in long term commitments by seeking funds from public markets.
infinite_spin 10 hours ago [-]
public investment can be magnitudes larger than your profit, allowing growth that would otherwise not be possible
saalweachter 9 hours ago [-]
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.
cowlevel 11 hours ago [-]
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.
pixelatedindex 9 hours ago [-]
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.
cowlevel 8 hours ago [-]
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.
3 hours ago [-]
infecto 8 hours ago [-]
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.
weakened_malloc 5 hours ago [-]
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.
jubilanti 9 hours ago [-]
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.
verdverm 3 hours ago [-]
> 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
Danox 10 hours ago [-]
All human endeavors play favorites. We shall see if the SEC will let lightning strike two times in one year.
AnimalMuppet 9 hours ago [-]
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.
9 hours ago [-]
stockresearcher 11 hours ago [-]
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?
JumpCrisscross 6 hours ago [-]
> 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.
thinkingtoilet 11 hours ago [-]
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.
stockresearcher 10 hours ago [-]
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?
JumpCrisscross 7 hours ago [-]
> 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?
andriy_koval 10 hours ago [-]
I won't be surprised if audit finds another few 100B of hidden debt
stockresearcher 10 hours ago [-]
But would that change your opinion?
ajmurmann 9 hours ago [-]
My opinion or the opinion of investors who trade individual stock?
andriy_koval 10 hours ago [-]
higher chance to recieve junk rating and reduced initial evaluation
stockresearcher 9 hours ago [-]
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.
fpoling 2 hours ago [-]
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)
andriy_koval 9 hours ago [-]
> 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
nh23423fefe 11 hours ago [-]
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?
CrimsonRain 7 hours ago [-]
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.
katbyte 10 hours ago [-]
Maybe the stock market shouldn’t be people’s retirements?
10 hours ago [-]
jobs_throwaway 8 hours ago [-]
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.
hdgvhicv 3 hours ago [-]
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
stale2002 9 hours ago [-]
> 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.
spiderice 10 hours ago [-]
The "the usual song and dance people" of letting people choose what to do with their money. Sure bud.
Animats 7 hours ago [-]
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.
ddxv 6 hours ago [-]
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.
JumpCrisscross 6 hours ago [-]
> 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.
Nevermark 4 hours ago [-]
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.
dennysora-main 6 hours ago [-]
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.
why_only_15 6 hours ago [-]
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!
ponector 1 minutes ago [-]
If they are earning $6 for every dollar spent why they are not profitable?
wqtz 11 hours ago [-]
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.
kazinator 10 hours ago [-]
> 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.
jawiggins 11 hours ago [-]
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.
thevinter 11 hours ago [-]
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"
jawiggins 11 hours ago [-]
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.
xvector 11 hours ago [-]
Most 401ks and pension funds do not invest in pre IPO companies, this is just blatant misinformation
JumpCrisscross 10 hours ago [-]
> 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].
“Private markets” is not the same thing as pre-IPO companies
JumpCrisscross 7 hours ago [-]
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.
drdrey 10 hours ago [-]
some pension funds definitely do
bryan_w 10 hours ago [-]
Who said anything about 401ks?
NewJazz 11 hours ago [-]
Better to dump it when valuation is low instead of inflated.
xienze 11 hours ago [-]
Aren't they still losing billions per year?
jawiggins 5 hours ago [-]
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.
alistairSH 11 hours ago [-]
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.
senordevnyc 9 hours ago [-]
They have been audited, it’s in the S-1.
JumpCrisscross 10 hours ago [-]
What makes you think Anthropic isn’t audited?
nicce 10 hours ago [-]
That is something obvious to add on relevant public materials.
JumpCrisscross 6 hours ago [-]
> 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].
The illiteracy financial influencers are promoting is worryingly apparent in this thread.
millspore 12 hours ago [-]
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?
phyzix5761 11 hours ago [-]
12 month waiting period plus 4+ quarters of profitable earnings before you qualify for inclusion.
11 hours ago [-]
JumpCrisscross 11 hours ago [-]
No.
msy 11 hours ago [-]
The SEC's obligation is to all market participants, not just index fund holders.
cgio 11 hours ago [-]
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.
jobs_throwaway 8 hours ago [-]
And denying market participant's ability to invest or short one of the most important companies in the world would be malpractice
sandworm101 11 hours ago [-]
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.
packetlost 11 hours ago [-]
> 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
Arubis 10 hours ago [-]
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.
deadlast2 2 hours ago [-]
After the complete fraud that is SpaceX who cares what they do.
dmix 8 hours ago [-]
Reading the other articles on this site, it seems to be about pushing aggressive AI regulation and general AI doomerism?
wmf 11 hours ago [-]
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.
novia 9 hours ago [-]
They already released the q3 numbers yesterday, right?
ddxv 6 hours ago [-]
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
JumpCrisscross 6 hours ago [-]
> 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.)
wmf 9 hours ago [-]
Ah, you're right. I didn't notice they updated the prospectus today.
singron 11 hours ago [-]
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.
andai 9 hours ago [-]
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!
edg5000 6 hours ago [-]
> 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.
MattDamonSpace 8 hours ago [-]
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”
MaintenanceMode 7 hours ago [-]
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.
HexnMarcusWolfe 8 hours ago [-]
No they shouldn't.
It's a "Junk stock". They should let it crash and burn.
10 hours ago [-]
JumpCrisscross 11 hours ago [-]
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.
digitaltrees 11 hours ago [-]
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
phyzix5761 11 hours ago [-]
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.
JumpCrisscross 10 hours ago [-]
> mandatory purchases by the index funds
How many dollars do you think are forced to purchase these companies’ shares?
yorwba 11 hours ago [-]
Maybe the SEC should instead block funds from distorting the market by making large predictable transactions, then.
andy_ppp 11 hours ago [-]
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.
JumpCrisscross 5 hours ago [-]
> 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]?
I go on to say the cap could be based on total hardware made to stop the prices from being crazy.
JumpCrisscross 4 hours ago [-]
> 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?
11 hours ago [-]
fzeroracer 10 hours ago [-]
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.
JumpCrisscross 6 hours ago [-]
> 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?
davidguetta 12 hours ago [-]
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) ?
judge2020 12 hours ago [-]
The S&P 500 denied early admission to SpaceX.
phyzix5761 11 hours ago [-]
There's a 12 month waiting period plus the company has to show 4+ quarters of positive net earnings before qualifying to be included.
gloryjulio 12 hours ago [-]
Spacex is not included in sp500 yet. Nasdaq is the one fast tracked spacex to dump on the retails
andriy_koval 12 hours ago [-]
Many funds use Russel indexes, which included SpaceX already
derektank 11 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
andriy_koval 9 hours ago [-]
> (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
JumpCrisscross 10 hours ago [-]
How many marginal dollars from that went into SpaceX?
The index drama was mostly a creation of influencers.
andriy_koval 10 hours ago [-]
so you saying you know exact number affected by index drama, and it is small? What is that?
JumpCrisscross 6 hours ago [-]
> 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].
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.
JumpCrisscross 5 hours ago [-]
> 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?
andriy_koval 5 hours ago [-]
> 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
Madmallard 6 hours ago [-]
Why does this matter?
Just distill their models completely. They have no moral high-ground at all there.
Danox 10 hours ago [-]
The insiders at the top won’t allow it…
zzzeek 11 hours ago [-]
I'm sorry, evacuate? In our moment of triumph?
mieses 2 hours ago [-]
lol at this article. The Machiavellian ethics of tech
zer00eyz 11 hours ago [-]
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.
xur17 11 hours ago [-]
> if I was one to bet
You can do exactly that on Polymarket and make good money if you are right.
fullshark 11 hours ago [-]
Why do you think they will delay the IPO? I bet there's enough demand to buy their stock.
slipperybeluga 11 hours ago [-]
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CurbStomper5 10 hours ago [-]
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fleroviumna 3 hours ago [-]
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demo4567 11 hours ago [-]
The SEC should SEC to protect the public.
hn_submit 4 hours ago [-]
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.
Rendered at 10:24:26 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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.
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.
For sure it's not a lifetime opportunity for a regular guy. I expect it to have a similar dynamics as Uber after IPO.
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
Can you be more specific? Are we talking about technical debt that Anthropic itself took on, or that its customers took on?
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.
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. :-)
First time?
Now bailing out somebody who over-invested in Nvidia but also holds the world's retirement savings... now that's something I can believe.
Because the nature of this whole thing is a cycle. The worst of it is that the consequences echo downwards until they hit social strata that can't handle any loss (because they have little). That's where the social cost really beds in, in the thousands and millions of ruined lives of ordinary people that are the collateral damage each time there's a failed round of the RL Investment Board Game funded by the world's wealthiest 10%.
If a multi-millionaire loses 50% of their net worth, they are still a multi-millionaire. When normal people lose 50% of their net worth, they have real problems.
Not arguing for a bailout, but the "it mainly hurts rich people" argument is pretty weak, and may actually be backward.
Not bailing out absolutely primarily hurts rich people. This is trivial to ascertain from basic principles.
> 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...
Still... something strikes me as just... well... morally wrong about that.
Didnt the US govt cause the crisis by refusing to regulate derivatives because their donors didnt want it to be regulated.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Not how the rule of law works!
Literally nobody said this.
Everyone gets audited financials before the De-SPAC process occurs.
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.
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.
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.
"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."
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.
Public-stock buyer or IPO buyer? The latter tend to be sophisticated.
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.
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.
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.
And that you couldn't subsequently do antitrust against OpenAI.
> “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.
> 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?
If day of the week is important you get more consistent results this way.
This is generally true of any growing time series. If you don't want this look at the audited GAAP figures.
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.
Footnotes are not some minor FYIs. In financial literature, they’re just a formatting choice. They’re fully part of the document.
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.
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?
People will learn risk-aversion vicariously, or end up living with the consequences of an inflated hubris. =3
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.
That's VERY GOOD.
Right? Right.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Don't they? To match expected growth over the years? There's only so much money in software.
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)
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.
> 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.
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.
Greg Brockman, OpenAI's president, gave Trump $25M.
Dario Amodei gave Trump a hard time.
Do the math...
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.
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?
> 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:)
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
Why do you think you don’t already have more than that many months of audited Anthropic financials?
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.
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)
I don't think that's what avg 401k holder is doing
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
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.
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.
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.
Why? Nobody is buying their shares without the opportunity to review both sets of data.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
Like, I can tell you definitively pensions are pretty broadly invested in Anthropic specifically through a number of funds.
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
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.
This is directly counter to the original point of public markets at all
—
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.
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.)
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.
Oh but sure it’s for a good cause
Genuinely surprised they didn’t ask us to “think of the children”
This is kind of desperate. The argument falls flat.
It's a "Junk stock". They should let it crash and burn.
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
How many dollars do you think are forced to purchase these companies’ shares?
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...
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?
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?
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.
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
The index drama was mostly a creation of influencers.
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...
Now, since than, spacex float increased from 555M shares to 4.3B.
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?
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
Just distill their models completely. They have no moral high-ground at all there.
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.
You can do exactly that on Polymarket and make good money if you are right.
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.