Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Anthropic confidentially submits draft S-1 to the SEC

anthropic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 476 posts

Re: Anthropic confidentially submits draft S-1 to the SEC

#231

Post by BoggleOhYeah »

stockresearcher wrote: post #191
BoggleOhYeah wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The person I was responding to was speaking to the fast-track concept, which has been a thing in CRSP indexes for a quite a while. The float requirement changes are directly due to these huge IPOs only placing small amounts of float on the market. Their goal seems to be tracking the market and making this change prevents them from excluding two notable companies from their indexes. IIRC CRSP indexes are float-weighte…

Strongly recommend reading this linked paper, written by CRSP folks: https://indexes.morningstar.com/insights/analysis/bltcd8e699... These IPOs will have minuscule impact on the indexes initially. They will have a big impact if they can maintain share price in the first ranking/reconstitution after the lockup period expires.

They will have a big impact if they can maintain share price AND the float increases due to the lockout period expiring (ie. pre-IPO owners selling off shares).

I'd like to know how the CRSP/Morningstar folks feel about the interesting lock-up period rules that Elon has inserted into the SpaceX IPO and how that jives with their analysis.

Re: Anthropic confidentially submits draft S-1 to the SEC

#232

Post by ashdksnndck »

radlad wrote: post #217
bwhiting2356 wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon was founded in 1994

As I recall, Amazon also famously didn't turn a profit for ages - but they were also capable of turning one much earlier than they did. Are AI companies capable of turning a profit today if they turn some knobs?

The narrative is that inference on existing models is profitable. All of the profits and many billions of additional capital invested go into training the next model, which is some multiple more expensive to train than the last. Each new model generation also leads to more revenue growth. Newer models are more compute-efficient when distilled (so could possibly be higher margin) but also they work on longer time-horizon tasks and can make greater use of test-time compute which increases token counts. So the inference ROI on each model can pay back the cost of training it, but future growth demands put all that money and more into training the next model. The numbers we’d need to prove whether this is true are not public, but it makes sense and fits what info we do have.

Theoretically, if training more expensive models stops resulting in better capabilities or isn’t economically viable, the labs can shift gears into making profit on old models. A lot of future growth is priced in so this would lead to a collapse in share price if it happens anytime soon.

There’s a story out that Anthropic might be profitable this quarter. This is in one sense bad news - it means that the company wasn’t aggressive enough about acquiring capacity last year, because they didn’t foresee how fast their inference business would grow. Anthropic is now forced to make suboptimal choices about serving existing users vs. training the next model (need to scrounge for capacity by paying other players like SpaceX). And as a Claude Code user I feel like I’ve been affected by that, what with the random outages and performance degradations.

Re: Anthropic confidentially submits draft S-1 to the SEC

#233

Post by Dig1t »

roadside_picnic wrote: post #52
cmiles8 wrote: post #25

There is a mad rush to get these IPOs out the door before the market sneezes.

It's more insidious than that. These IPOs aren't being rushed, they were waiting for all the pieces to be in place to force 401ks and other retirement plans to buy these IPOs. The most recent change was the NASDAQ adopting the "fast change rule" which allows newly IPO'd companies to be listed in the index after only 15 days of trading. This rule was decided March 30, 2026 and only came into effect May 1, 2026. The pl…

They only go into the index if they are actually worth enough to go into the index. If they drop below a certain value they will naturally be kicked out of the index just like any other company. I.e. if they are not actually in the top 500 US companies then they will not be in the 500 index. The risk of any one company is balanced by all the other companies in the index also.

If they really are a scam, their value will drop and they will be kicked out of the index. I still don’t understand how this means people will be “holding the bag”.

Additionally if you really believe that they are a scam and their price will fall you can just short the stock to completely neutralize their effect on your 401k.

Re: Anthropic confidentially submits draft S-1 to the SEC

#234

Post by IrishTechie »

glitch13 wrote: post #189
40acres wrote: post #65

After years of companies refusing to go public (looking at you Stripe), it's almost refreshing to see a hyped tech go actually IPO.

"Going public" means something completely different now, especially for these companies in the news (Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceX, etc). Going public used to mean selling a portion of your company for the capital required to grow. Ideally John Q. Public buys stock, the company grows, and they can sell the stock for more money. These companies already have the capital required to grow from private investment, and already…

I recall thinking the same thing when Apple and Microsoft hit $1tn. Here we are less than a decade later and they’re up 3-400%.

Re: Anthropic confidentially submits draft S-1 to the SEC

#235

Post by panarky »

roadside_picnic wrote: post #52
cmiles8 wrote: post #25

There is a mad rush to get these IPOs out the door before the market sneezes.

It's more insidious than that. These IPOs aren't being rushed, they were waiting for all the pieces to be in place to force 401ks and other retirement plans to buy these IPOs. The most recent change was the NASDAQ adopting the "fast change rule" which allows newly IPO'd companies to be listed in the index after only 15 days of trading. This rule was decided March 30, 2026 and only came into effect May 1, 2026. The pl…

Nonsense.

The extremely small float of these offerings will make index weights a rounding error.

Ask your LLM of choice to compare the likely value of shares to be held by index funds with the market cap of each of these companies.

Re: Anthropic confidentially submits draft S-1 to the SEC

#236

Post by lanthissa »

pseudosavant wrote: post #197

Up until this point, the potential for an AI bust blast radius was limited to corporate investors, but this is going to cause regular retail/401k investors to get exposure, which could have far bigger impacts on a downturn. Not to mention the insane wake-up call it is going to be for these AI stocks when 3 months after they launch they have to start making earnings calls and showing their financials. That quarter-by-…

you cant have it both ways, the public can either have exposure and capture the upside or not.

there are ways for you to manage your risk if it in public markets, theres nothing you can do if its in private.

Re: Anthropic confidentially submits draft S-1 to the SEC

#237

Post by boshalfoshal »

eamag wrote: post #61

why did they raise 3 days ago? What's the benefit of doing this instead of going public right away? If it's just cash to pay for GPUs, can't they issue bonds or something?

Conspiratorially, it seems like a shotgun attempt at undermining the supposed OpenAI IPO later this year.

Also filing an S-1 doesn't actually indicate that they intend to go public "immediately," it just gives them the option to go public (probably in the near future).

Re: Anthropic confidentially submits draft S-1 to the SEC

#238

Post by lanthissa »

qznc wrote: post #229
arrowleaf wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most (all?) 401k plans limit you to a pre-picked list of ETFs and mutual funds you can invest in. Not to mention the standard advice for decades has been 'broad market index fund'.

Afaik this is the first time that an IPO is big that it immediately gets a significant share of a broad market index fund. The rules among the providers are actually quite diverse, so it's complicated. The Rational Reminder podcast discussed it in April: https://rationalreminder.ca/podcast/406 Their conclusion: It might be bad, but so be it. No need to change strategy.

if you want to personally manage your risk you can by taking a small short position or buying long dated puts.

It being in the public markets is something you can deal with if you want.

It being in private markets means you cannot choose to participate in the upside if you want.

Re: Anthropic confidentially submits draft S-1 to the SEC

#239

Post by JumpCrisscross »

pseudosavant wrote: post #197

Up until this point, the potential for an AI bust blast radius was limited to corporate investors, but this is going to cause regular retail/401k investors to get exposure, which could have far bigger impacts on a downturn. Not to mention the insane wake-up call it is going to be for these AI stocks when 3 months after they launch they have to start making earnings calls and showing their financials. That quarter-by-…

> corporate investors

What? No. VCs, pensions, etc aren’t corporate investors in any common terminology.

Re: Anthropic confidentially submits draft S-1 to the SEC

#240

Post by ifwinterco »

panarky wrote: post #224
pseudosavant wrote: post #197

Up until this point, the potential for an AI bust blast radius was limited to corporate investors, but this is going to cause regular retail/401k investors to get exposure, which could have far bigger impacts on a downturn. Not to mention the insane wake-up call it is going to be for these AI stocks when 3 months after they launch they have to start making earnings calls and showing their financials. That quarter-by-…

If we're doing historical comparisons, there was so much hype for AOL and Yahoo that drove valuations far beyond the economics. In time, the hypesters were proved wrong. In contrast, there was overwhelming doom and gloom for Google's IPO, in spite of their incredible growth and margin economics. In time, the doomers were proved wrong. There's so much doom and gloom about Anthropic that directly contradicts their asto…

I don't think it's really doom and gloom, that's mostly on here.

The normies are all still excited/scared and the valuation based on secondary trading is going up and up.

Maybe not quite as crazy as the dot com boom but I'd say the current environment for AI and related equities is a lot closer to the mid/late 90s than 2004

Post reply on HN