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.<p>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.
If the government shouldn’t press its thumb on the scale at the start (fair to argue!) then it shouldn’t press its thumb on the scale when they demand a bailout.
Agreed, so also don't bailout.
Agreed. However, “the government” is very much not a monolithic entity.
Bailouts have been a wonderful tool in the 21st century. During 2008 crisis, there was an unbelievable high ROI to them, both in the $ value of investments in the banks and in the global economic catastrophe it prevented.
It's not as simple as just looking at the ROI of an individual bailout; what if the crisis itself only happened at the level it did because of the expectation of the bailout in the first place?<p>> 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.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_hazard#Connection_to_the_2008_financial_crisis" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_hazard#Connection_to_the...</a>
> and in the global economic catastrophe it prevented.<p>Didnt the US govt cause the crisis by refusing to regulate derivatives because their donors didnt want it to be regulated.
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.<p>Still... something strikes me as just... well... morally wrong about that.
The housing bailout also arguably worked extraordinarily well at preventing a much greater, prolonged loss / depression of value in real-estate. The largest bailout in world history went to US homeowners via the Fed de facto purchasing garbage mortgages to pull them off the market.
But isn’t that kicking the can down the road? Isn’t that the reason housing is incredibly over valued and wealth inequality is a huge problem here and around the world?
"Depression of value" aka "making housing more affordable".
Were the normal people who lost everything ever bailed out?
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b-but but then... who owns the bag?<p>do you know how expensive private jets are to operate?
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.<p>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).
The SEC would beg to differ with your first para. I imagine that "protect" involves "adjudication":<p>"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."
Note what that explicitly doesn’t say. Any decisions about good or bad investments.
Hasn't done that my entire life. GG.
Unless you're accusing Anthropic of misconduct in their financial reporting obligations I fail to see the connection.
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.
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'.<p>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.
Can you explain your objection more? They have several sections of their S-1 dedicated to this, and it's been public knowledge for a while (the other big IPO this year had it as a pro), so I'm not sure what you mean by "misconduct in their financial reporting obligations"
They can have as many pages of explanation on it as they want, it doesn't address the fact that they need to be factored into headline numbers. It's the distinction between technical correctness and communicative correctness. It's like surprising and unusual clauses in contracts - those are invalid too if you aren't sufficiently upfront about it.<p>It's an IPO, the P is public. The information needs to be consumable by the <i>public</i>. 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.<p>And that's exactly where the SEC comes in. The 1930s went wrong enough, no point in doing a 2030s repeat.
> <i>random IPO stock buyer</i><p>Public-stock buyer or IPO buyer? The latter tend to be sophisticated.
> 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.<p>I'd wager that the 95th percentile, and maybe the 99th percentile anthropic IPO participant, by volume, is a more sophisticated stock evaluator than either you or me.
It’s astonishing how many people here claim to be financial experts and interpret the Anthropic IPO in a way that makes them look evil.
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?
This wasn't hidden in the footnotes of the S1. It was quite clearly explained on page 3, under "Select Defined Terms": <a href="https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/2130357/000162828026068676/anthropicpbc-sx1ax1.htm" rel="nofollow">https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/2130357/000162828026...</a><p>> “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.
~All companies provide non-GAAP numbers alongside the standard ones, and amended S-1s are also extremely common. Neither of those is remotely indicative of anything nefarious
Anyone who doesn’t read footnotes in prospectuses, quarterly reports, etc. has no business investing, full stop.<p>Footnotes are not some minor FYIs. In financial literature, they’re just a formatting choice. They’re fully part of the document.
It's totally normal for companies to release their own take on the numbers alongside GAAP ones.
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"?<p>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.<p>Also, if you didn't hear, their Q3 results were spectacular and were included in an amendment today.<p>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.<p>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.
The SEC should adjudicate more. The entire SPAC era should never have happened.
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.<p>Everyone gets audited financials before the De-SPAC process occurs.
All the SPACS, the NKLA (truck rolling down a hill) stuff, GME/AMC, Zack Morris crypto pumpers, SAVA (fake Alzheimer's drug) and investigations of shorters was a total disgrace. Truly the golden age of fraud. I don't think we'll see a market that insane for another 20 years.
Chamath thinks otherwise.
>isn't to adjudicate on whether Anthropic is a good or bad bet for investors<p>Gensler spent his entire time at the SEC doing exactly that type of adjudication.
> <i>Gensler spent his entire time at the SEC doing exactly that type of adjudication</i><p>Wasn't his war against SPACs' limited financial disclosures and conflicts of interests, <i>i.e.</i> the way companies went public, versus against any issuer <i>per se</i>?
There's middle ground.<p>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.<p>You also omit an important constituency in your formulation. Corporations are extended limited liability with the idea that it will benefit the public. The government absolutely should be taking steps to ensure that this is true.
You could but why stop there? I argue that enforcing the standards for compliance and transparency is one of the greatest levers. After that it’s on the market. You will never stop an individual from buying fools gold and in some sense it’s healthy for some to fail no matter how silly the investment was.
> Like I would ban controlling share classes.<p>Any reason why? To be honest, they never sit well with me either, but not sure what my argument would be for banning them. All investors are well aware of what they're putting their money into.
I agree with this. In all the tech cases I've seen it just seems to enable dynastic control with no obvious market, shareholder benefit.
Good thing you're not in charge with your communist attitude. If they kept controlling shares hidden from public, you'd had a point. Nobody is asking you to buy shares of companies with controlling shares.
Informed consent is extremely important. Its also exceedingly rare today, and the pandemic response didn't help.
Agreed, some people like to gamble, and it is not in civilizations long-term interest to preserve the fiscal integrity of the irrational.<p>People will learn risk-aversion vicariously, or end up living with the consequences of an inflated hubris. =3
It's mainly the FTC, but I think the SEC does enforce some rules on pyramid schemes etc. even if the operators of them aren't being misleading. Certain business models are ruled out.<p>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.
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.<p>That's VERY GOOD.<p>Right? Right.
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> the number of Americans using AI at work fell significantly between the summers of 2025 (46%) and 2026 (33%).<p>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.
Found the paper: <a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5136877" rel="nofollow">https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5136877</a><p>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.<p>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).<p>The methodology and survey questions are included, the numbers seem to be based on a straightforward "Do you use generative AI for your job"?<p>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.
That sentence links to <a href="https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2026/07/28/ai-revenues-are-growing-fast-but-not-fast-enough" rel="nofollow">https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2026/07/28/a...</a><p>Here's the relevant paragraph from that story:<p>> 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.<p>Coincidentally I posted an updated chart of AI use according to the Census Bureau this morning - <a href="https://simonwillison.net/2026/Nov/2/census-bureau-super-intelligence/" rel="nofollow">https://simonwillison.net/2026/Nov/2/census-bureau-super-int...</a> - they changed their methodology in December but the numbers have been trending up in 2026.<p>As for the "survey by Jon Hartley", I think that's this one: <a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5136877" rel="nofollow">https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5136877</a> - "Job Loss Fears in the First Years of Generative Artificial Intelligence".<p>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:<p>ChatGPT, Midjourney, Claude, Gemini, Github Copilot, Scribe, Embedded products, DeepSeek, Apple Intelligence, Meta AI (Llama), Adobe Firefly<p>After even more digging, I think I found the raw data for their survey in the Internet Archive: <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20250910015550/https://generativeairesearch.org/us-survey-data/" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20250910015550/https://generativ...</a><p>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 <a href="https://generativeairesearch.org/" rel="nofollow">https://generativeairesearch.org/</a> no longer loads and the Internet Archive don't seem to have captured anything later than 2025.
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.<p>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.<p>ETA: I still don't think the SEC should get involved in what companies should or should not be allowed to list publicly beyond certifying that the company is not materially misleading their investors.
It's the railroading that's being decreased. Various tech orgs are pushing back on everyone in the company pushing PRs as they realized is profoundly wasteful and unfair for people to push 10 PRs and then just dump it into someone elses lap to validate. "Claude already made a PR for it" doesn't hold up when you can't make a meaningful judgement on the output. Not every org is there yet, but my read is its happening at places like Goldman.
It’s not hard to find fluctuating surveys, but it’s the wrong question to be asking.<p>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.<p>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.
I'm seeing in offices, usage has gone down significantly. For alot of people, it takes more time to figure out how to get ai to do something vs just doing it.
I'm pretty exhausted by the amount of prompting it takes to get Opus 5.5 to do some things the way I want it done. And I'm fighting against a complex system no human wrote. Claude also writes Jira tickets and voluminous comments that no human reasonably understands, so it's all become a huge clusterfuck. Nobody even runs the project locally so we can't even review the changes until they hit a dev server 30 or 40 minutes later. Been at this company for 8 years and this year has turned into a complete shitshow thanks to the CTO drinking the AI kool-aide. I'm looking for a new job.
I have the impression that the gifted can leverage AI a lot more than normal people. My early views about AI were that it would democratize intelligence, but now my opinion is that it will be a huge catalyst for the gifted people, increasing social and economic differences.
From personal experience, what I've seen is the opposite. The less "gifted" attempt to lean on AI to close capability gaps, with results that are amusing at best, and disastrous at worst.
I think this is in line with GPs point, no?<p>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.<p>(At least that's how I read it)
Anecdotally, I didn't start using AI at work until after summer 2025, and now it's essential.
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.<p>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.
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?
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.
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.
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:<p>> A survey by Jon Hartley of the University of Texas at Austin and others has found that about 33% of people now use AI at work, down from a peak of 46% in mid-2025.
I think they should still go public, and it shouldn't be stopped.<p>To be honest, whether a company is operating well or not will become clear after it goes public.<p>At the same time, only with financial transparency can there be better supervision.<p>Also, this is one way for everyone to participate in AI construction and development to some extent.<p>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.
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.
The concern is that “bad apples” get into indices and then that starts to rot people’s futures. I’m not sure how that will play out (indices can kick them out, or if the company really fails the market cap will reflect that and the index can “heal”). I’m guessing Enron was part of the index at some point, but we survived that.
Well as we already saw with SpaceX, indices are separate entities that are not fully controlled by the SEC. There are plenty of companies on the market that aren't in indices anyway, you don't need to block a company from the market to block it from the index.
People keep saying “bad apples into indices” but I have yet to truly understand what folks mean. Most of the mainstay indices would not include a fresh on the block new comer and it would generally need to follow other criteria. Yes SpaceX got added to the Nasdaq 100 but that is the whole purpose of that index. People should not be investing their savings in that.
What they mean is that when a company becomes part of an index, like the S&P500, historically, they come in somewhere around approximately rank 500. The S&P naturally results in more buying of winners and more selling of losers, so anyone who owns an S&P ETF will own that stock when its approximately rank 500, and will own more and more of it as it grows to be a bigger part of the index (higher rank).<p>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 <i>marginal</i> upside if they continue performing and generating returns.<p>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 <i>reasonable</i> upside exposure.<p>I'm probably butchering my explanation here, so apologies if it sounds odd.
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.
All human endeavors play favorites. We shall see if the SEC will let lightning strike two times in one year.
Even if so, human endeavors like the SEC are supposed to play favorites <i>according to specific, well-established rules</i>. At that point, it becomes a bit of a stretch to call it "playing favorites".<p>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.
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.<p>Additionally, some ETFs have built in protections to rule out businesses that are not yet profitable (like SpaceX and Anthropic), which I think is a great rule.
If companies were already profitable why would they go public?
To let early investors exit? Most private funds like that have a horizon of 10 years, so they want to sell their investments at some point.
Same reason they take private investments or loans: To grow faster than would be possible without that.
That’s the old style IPO though, most IPOs nowadays do not actually raise money.<p>SpaceX made that even more clear by doing an explicit offering of shares to raise money just months after their IPO, which didn’t raise them any money at all but was just for investors and employees.
I"m not sure i can agree with your statement.<p>> 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<p>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.<p>The only IPO's i can see on file where companies didn't raies money were 3 direct listings<p>- Georgia Banking Company (GBC)<p>- avion Healthcare (DAVI)<p>- TurboGen Ltd. (TRBG),<p>If you know any of those companies you are deep into the cash equity markets:)
Clearly to hedge the risk of $580 Billion in long term commitments by seeking funds from public markets.
public investment can be magnitudes larger than your profit, allowing growth that would otherwise not be possible
It used to be the norm for companies to become profitable, then IPO, moreso for megacorps.<p>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.
Elon Musk gave Trump $290M.<p>Greg Brockman, OpenAI's president, gave Trump $25M.<p>Dario Amodei gave Trump a hard time.<p>Do the math...
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?
The simplest explanation is, barring all else, usually the most likely.
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.<p>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?
> <i>There’s plenty of argument about how if a company has an IPO then they are, by definition, part of the market</i><p>The core thesis is <i>all</i> 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 single second is great in theory, since you'll be diversified across the market as a whole, but you'll also lose all your money in fees.<p>This is why the S&P 500 exists. It's a limited number of names that are very liquid, <i>i.e.</i> transactable at scale at reasonable cost. As trading fees went down we saw larger and larger indices.
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.
Do you really expect to learn something that you don't already know by making Anthropic do two quarters of audited financials? What happens then? Come up with another reason for delay?
> <i>Do you really expect to learn something that you don't already know by making Anthropic do two quarters of audited financials?</i><p>Why do you think you don’t already have more than that many months of audited Anthropic financials?
I won't be surprised if audit finds another few 100B of hidden debt
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.
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?
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.
Maybe the stock market shouldn’t be people’s retirements?
> What's the alternative.<p>The alternative is don't invest in them?<p>Or, if you are this certain that they are going to fail, then short their stock. You could make millions.
The "the usual song and dance people" of letting people choose what to do with their money. Sure bud.
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!
As long as the S-1 is honest, the SEC is doing its job.<p>A real risk is the market cap, including insider holdings, being large enough to force the stock into major indices. That makes the stock a must-buy for index funds. That in turn props up the stock regardless of how crappy the financial position and how small the float. That was controversial when Space-X went public. It went into several major indices despite not really being that big in terms of revenue.
It felt a bit dishonest in that they pushed out their S-1 without Q3, and then it turns out Q3 revenue growth is decelerating (which they added in the recent addendum).<p>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'.<p>If people want to invest, let them invest.
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.<p>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.<p>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.
> Dig a little deeper, however, and a far bleaker picture emerges<p>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?<p>And the ones who don't are just going to be victims of their own greed anyway.
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.<p>This is kind of desperate. The argument falls flat.
> 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.<p>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.<p>It may take a few years though.
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.
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?
12 month waiting period plus 4+ quarters of profitable earnings before you qualify for inclusion.
No.
The SEC's obligation is to all market participants, not just index fund holders.
Arguably if you consciously choose to invest on a stock there should be no protection or obstacle other than regulated controls. For indices I see the point of extra protection. Where it gets murky is when you look at retirement funds, where you still have no control, but that should be regulation on the funds themselves rather than the stock.
And denying market participant's ability to invest or short one of the most important companies in the world would be malpractice
These days? All rules are maybe this or maybe that depending on political winds.<p>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.<p>Anthropic is free to continue selling shares privately. They can setup a website and take cc payments if the care so much.
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.
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!
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.
What a bad idea “let’s further empower a fickle federal gov to dictate the lives of citizens”<p>Oh but sure it’s for a good cause<p>Genuinely surprised they didn’t ask us to “think of the children”
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.
Reading the other articles on this site, it seems to be about pushing aggressive AI regulation and general AI doomerism?
Signed with love, Sam.<p>—<p>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.
No they shouldn't.<p>It's a "Junk stock". They should let it crash and burn.
Why does this matter?<p>Just distill their models completely. They have no moral high-ground at all there.
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) ?
The S&P 500 denied early admission to SpaceX.
There's a 12 month waiting period plus the company has to show 4+ quarters of positive net earnings before qualifying to be included.
Spacex is not included in sp500 yet. Nasdaq is the one fast tracked spacex to dump on the retails
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.
Please edit the first sentence out. Keep it civil.<p>As far as your claim, it's fine to say let the market sort it out, but perhaps consider that pension funds and index funds now represent a market distortion that means anthropic crashing is harder and even if it does would happen after the mandatory purchases by the index funds which is basically a transfer from the public to the insiders at anthropic
There's a 12 month waiting period plus the company has to show 4+ quarters of positive net earnings before qualifying to be included in the S&P 500. Pension and index funds are gonna be ok.
> <i>mandatory purchases by the index funds</i><p>How many dollars do you think are forced to purchase these companies’ shares?
Maybe the SEC should instead block funds from distorting the market by making large predictable transactions, then.
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.
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.<p>That's why people want the IPO to be blocked because we've seen what happens before.
The insiders at the top won’t allow it…
I'm sorry, evacuate? In our moment of triumph?
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)<p>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.
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The SEC should SEC to protect the public.