Anthropic confidentially submits draft S-1 to the SEC • Hacker News Board

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

#341

Post by munk-a » Mon, Jun 01, 2026, 11:19 PM UTC

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-…

It's the indices we need to be concerned about and it's especially the bloated carcass of xAI hanging onto SpaceX.

SpaceX was a profitable company, it was heavily invested into R&D and had managed to build a tidily profitable connectivity business in Starlink. Now the company is being burdened with all the worthless debt of X and xAI with a likely merger with Tesla following launch just to hand Musk a big check when he hits the valuation targets.

IPO inclusion on indices should be illegal, the price discovery simply hasn't happened yet and it's a direct grab at the most vulnerable retail investors - the passive index huggers that were told that if they just buy an index it'll never be spectacular and it might dip but it'll steadily go up.

I would not be surprised if the US Government ends up bailing out retirees over this and cements the country's descent into debt. Pretty much everyone can see it coming, but we have to act as if Elon is valuing his companies in good faith and not just trying to rob a payday.

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

#342

Post by keeda » Mon, Jun 01, 2026, 11:20 PM UTC

As a layman external observer, this seems a bit rushed to me? I know there's a race amongst the frontier AI labs, but I don't quite understand the rush (apparently there is still a lot of money to go around), so as some comments imply, it does look like "our financials look good right now let's strike while the iron is hot!"

I do think Anthropic's business has very good long-term prospects, but the current run rates are not sustainable and they know it which is why they, more than OpenAI, are under higher pressure to IPO. Some things to consider:

1. This was surprising to me, but enterprises Claude Code (and Codex) plans are billed on token usage at API rates. I was expecting lower rates for volume subscriptions. This explains their huge spike in ARR, but I expect competitive pressures will soon come into play, especially as companies start to get more budget-conscious. Specifically...

2. Tokenmaxxing is finally encountering the inevitable pushback. My theory is it was an effort to incentivize devs to experiment and figure out ways to get productive with AI by throwing money at the problem, which was always going to be a short-term dynamic. Companies are going to be much more intentional about token budgets (especially as Anthropic is apparently now asking for volume commitments for enterprise plans.) Smaller, open-weight models may start looking much more attractive.

3. I've said before but I think Anthropic severely underestimated their own popularity and corresponding demand for compute and has to enter costly deals to acquire capacity to keep Claude's 9's above GitHub's, even as they alienated customers with short term tweaks to optimize usage. These deals will eat into their margins and Claude's problems likely pushed customers to competitors, the effects of which could take time to be more evident.

So maybe whatever looks good on their financials right now is time-limited, and the current boost may start petering out at some point, which may influence when OpenAI files their own IPO.

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

#343

Post by martinald » Mon, Jun 01, 2026, 11:20 PM UTC

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-…

Let's get it in perspective though. The S&P500 market cap is currently $70T.

Assume that Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceX all IPO and get included in SPY with the new fast listing rules. They are likely to be worth $3-4T combined, which means 'retail' investors are going to have perhaps 5% of their portfolio in it.

_Arugably_ that's a pretty fair allocation for retail investors to have to these "moonshot" style companies.

Also - if any one of these IPOs don't go well; I suspect the other(s) will have to postpone, further reducing exposure.

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

#344

Post by bsder » Mon, Jun 01, 2026, 11:23 PM UTC

radicalbyte wrote: post #296

pseudosavant wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google is an excellent example of the companies that followed after the initial batch of big dotcom companies. They ate Yahoo's lunch. The dotcom bust was in 2000, and Google went public in 2004. I'm betting more on the successors to this initial group of AI companies. The ones that have to build actual profitable businesses.

Google was easily 10x better than any of their competition. It was effectively alone in the market. Most of us were using 56k modems to access the internet back then, Google's search returned results within a couple of seconds. Yahoo, Lycos, Excite, Alta-Vista were still loading. Then the search results themselves were so good you could often just pick the first result. They eventually added a button which just took…

> Alta-Vista were still loading

Your memory is faulty. AltaVista was always super fast--it never had the advertising bloat that the other ones had until the very end.

The problem AltaVista had was that it didn't scale when the Internet went exponential--so AltaVista would give you good search results until you asked current, topical questions. AltaVista relied on running a single, super-expensive stonking huge Alpha machine while Google ran on lots of commodity servers that spidered constantly.

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

#345

Post by derwiki » Mon, Jun 01, 2026, 11:23 PM UTC

ai_fry_ur_brain wrote: post #304

dmoy wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe don't buy QQQ in your 401k then if you're concerned about nasdaq100 inclusion

Tell that to everyones 50 year old mother who doesnt even know how to login to their account, let alone modify their allocations.

50 isn’t old? I would expect a 50 year old mother to be competent.

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

#346

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jun 01, 2026, 11:26 PM UTC

radicalbyte wrote: post #296

pseudosavant wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google is an excellent example of the companies that followed after the initial batch of big dotcom companies. They ate Yahoo's lunch. The dotcom bust was in 2000, and Google went public in 2004. I'm betting more on the successors to this initial group of AI companies. The ones that have to build actual profitable businesses.

Google was easily 10x better than any of their competition. It was effectively alone in the market. Most of us were using 56k modems to access the internet back then, Google's search returned results within a couple of seconds. Yahoo, Lycos, Excite, Alta-Vista were still loading. Then the search results themselves were so good you could often just pick the first result. They eventually added a button which just took…

[deleted]

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

#347

Post by xracy » Mon, Jun 01, 2026, 11:30 PM UTC

martinald wrote: post #343

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-…

Let's get it in perspective though. The S&P500 market cap is currently $70T. Assume that Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceX all IPO and get included in SPY with the new fast listing rules. They are likely to be worth $3-4T combined, which means 'retail' investors are going to have perhaps 5% of their portfolio in it. _Arugably_ that's a pretty fair allocation for retail investors to have to these "moonshot" style companies…

Who invests in an index fund for "moonshots"?

Everyone I know who invests in an index fund is doing so to mitigate the risks of things like "moonshots" which are typically much riskier investments.

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

#348

Post by xracy » Mon, Jun 01, 2026, 11:32 PM UTC

Curious how someone with a 401k, who didn't want their retirement to be used by these companies to buy at an inflated price, would go about opting out of this.

Typically I just have my 401k in an index fund so that things have to become established before they're added. This seems like it's circumventing that, and I would be inclined to vote with my wallet. But everything around 401k index funds that I see are very opaque, so it's not totally clear to me how I would avoid this if I wanted to.

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

#349

Post by martinald » Mon, Jun 01, 2026, 11:34 PM UTC

xracy wrote: post #347

martinald wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's get it in perspective though. The S&P500 market cap is currently $70T. Assume that Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceX all IPO and get included in SPY with the new fast listing rules. They are likely to be worth $3-4T combined, which means 'retail' investors are going to have perhaps 5% of their portfolio in it. _Arugably_ that's a pretty fair allocation for retail investors to have to these "moonshot" style companies…

Who invests in an index fund for "moonshots"? Everyone I know who invests in an index fund is doing so to mitigate the risks of things like "moonshots" which are typically much riskier investments.

Is it? I thought the idea was diversity of risk, not "mitigating risk". You clearly don't want 100% of your 401k in OpenAI or Anthropic. But you probably do want 1 or 2% of it in, to give you the long term growth potential?

Regardless SPY is actually a pretty "risky" index fund on some measures - it pays a (very) low dividend compared to many other intl/ETF funds and is weighted very heavily towards tech stocks (atm).

If you genuinely wanted to mitigate risk you would probably not choose SPY.

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

#350

Post by xracy » Mon, Jun 01, 2026, 11:39 PM UTC

martinald wrote: post #349

xracy wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who invests in an index fund for "moonshots"? Everyone I know who invests in an index fund is doing so to mitigate the risks of things like "moonshots" which are typically much riskier investments.

Is it? I thought the idea was diversity of risk, not "mitigating risk". You clearly don't want 100% of your 401k in OpenAI or Anthropic. But you probably do want 1 or 2% of it in, to give you the long term growth potential? Regardless SPY is actually a pretty "risky" index fund on some measures - it pays a (very) low dividend compared to many other intl/ETF funds and is weighted very heavily towards tech stocks (atm)…

> Is it?

Given that they've had to change the rules of index funds to allow for this, yes, this is not what people expect.