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Anthropic taps IPO lawyers as it races OpenAI to go public

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Re: Anthropic taps IPO lawyers as it races OpenAI to go public

#61

It's interesting that Amazon don't appear interested in acquiring Anthropic, which would have seemed like somewhat of a natural fit given that they are already partnered, Anthropic have apparently optimized (or at least adapted) for Trainium, and Amazon don't have their own frontier model. It seems that Amazon are playing this much like Microsoft - seeing themselves are more of a cloud provider, happy to serve anyone…

Amazon and Microsoft are protecting themselves from the bubble.

Yes, repackaging and reselling AI is a starkly better business than creating frontier models

Re: Anthropic taps IPO lawyers as it races OpenAI to go public

#62
post #10
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The optimistic view is that Anthropic is one of about four labs in the world capable of generating truly state-of-the-art models. Also, Claude Code is arguably the best tool in its category at the moment. They have the developer market locked in. The problem as I see it is that neither of those things are significant moats. Both OpenAI and Google have far better branding and a much larger user base, and Google also h…

> Claude Code is arguably the best tool in its category at the moment. They have the developer market locked in. I am old enough (> 1 year old) to remember when Cursor had won the developer market from the previous winner copilot. Google or Apple should have locked down Anthropic.

> Cursor had won the developer market from the previous winner copilot

It’s a fair point, but the counter-point is that back then these tools were ide plugins you could code up in a weekend. Ie closer to a consumer app.

Now Claude Code is a somewhat mature enterprise platform with plenty of integrations that you’d need to chase too. And long-term enterprise sales contracts you’d need to sell into. Ie much more like an enterprise SAAS play.

I don’t want to push this argument too far as I think their actual competitors (eg Google) could crank out the work required in 6-12 months if they decided to move in that direction, but it does protect them from some of the frothy VC-funded upstarts that simply can’t structurally compete in multi-year enterprise SAAS.

Re: Anthropic taps IPO lawyers as it races OpenAI to go public

#63
post #43
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That jumped out at me too. Like a time-traveling comment or something!

This is what happens when someone copies and pastes their old comment, note the other tells.

Nope, more like a LLM that doesn't know about GPT 5 and Gemini 3

Re: Anthropic taps IPO lawyers as it races OpenAI to go public

#65
post #49

It's interesting that Amazon don't appear interested in acquiring Anthropic, which would have seemed like somewhat of a natural fit given that they are already partnered, Anthropic have apparently optimized (or at least adapted) for Trainium, and Amazon don't have their own frontier model. It seems that Amazon are playing this much like Microsoft - seeing themselves are more of a cloud provider, happy to serve anyone…

Why are you assuming Anthropic is for sale? They have a clear path to profitability, booming growth, and a massive and mission driven founding team. They could make more money keeping control of the company and have control.

Assuming by "they" you mean current shareholders (who include Google and Amazon and VCs) if they are selling at least in part, why would at least some of them not be willing to sell their entire stakes?

> They could make more money keeping control of the company and have control.

It depends on how much they can sell for.

Re: Anthropic taps IPO lawyers as it races OpenAI to go public

#66
post #49

It's interesting that Amazon don't appear interested in acquiring Anthropic, which would have seemed like somewhat of a natural fit given that they are already partnered, Anthropic have apparently optimized (or at least adapted) for Trainium, and Amazon don't have their own frontier model. It seems that Amazon are playing this much like Microsoft - seeing themselves are more of a cloud provider, happy to serve anyone…

Why are you assuming Anthropic is for sale? They have a clear path to profitability, booming growth, and a massive and mission driven founding team. They could make more money keeping control of the company and have control.

> They have a clear path to profitability

I'd love to see evidence for such a thing, because it's not clear to me at all that this is the case.

I personally think they're the best of the model providers but not sure if any foundation model companies (pure play) have a path to profitability.

Re: Anthropic taps IPO lawyers as it races OpenAI to go public

#67

Does this mean that Anthropic has more than reached AGI, seeing as OpenAI has officially defined "AGI" as any AI that manages to create more than a hectocorn's worth (100 unicorns, or $100B) in economic value?

If they have reached AGI (whatever the definition), we should be prioritizing looking for signs of misanthropy.

Re: Anthropic taps IPO lawyers as it races OpenAI to go public

#68
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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You haven’t actually looked at their fundamentals. They’re profitable serving current models including training costs and are only losing money on future RD training, but if you project future revenue growth on future generations of models you get a clear path to profitability. They charge higher costs than OpenAI and have faster growing API demand. They have great margins compared to the rest of the industry on infe…

> They’re profitable serving current models including training costs

I hear this a lot, do you have a good source (apart from their CEO saying it in an interview). I might have more faith in him but checks notes, it's late 2025 and AI is not writing all our code yet (amongst other mental things he's said).

Re: Anthropic taps IPO lawyers as it races OpenAI to go public

#69
post #57

Okay, let’s see you guys get passed the inference costs disclosure. According to WSJ it is enough to kill the frontier shop business model. It’s one of the biggest things blocking OpenAI https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/big-techs-soaring-profits-have-a...

Inference costs aren't a problem, selling inference is almost certainly profitable. The problem is that its (probably) not profitable enough to cover the training and other R&D costs.

Don't forget all the other costs of their business, like paying sales and solutions people (expensive, not going away any time soon).

Re: Anthropic taps IPO lawyers as it races OpenAI to go public

#70

It's interesting that Amazon don't appear interested in acquiring Anthropic, which would have seemed like somewhat of a natural fit given that they are already partnered, Anthropic have apparently optimized (or at least adapted) for Trainium, and Amazon don't have their own frontier model. It seems that Amazon are playing this much like Microsoft - seeing themselves are more of a cloud provider, happy to serve anyone…

LOL of course they don't want to own Anthropic, else they themselves would be responsible for coming up with the $10s of billions in Monopoly money that Anthropic has committed to pay AMZN for compute in the next few years. Better to take an impressive looking stake and leave some other idiot holding the buck.

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