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Anthropic Is Preparing for IPO and We Should Be Worried

vincentschmalbach.com

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Re: Anthropic Is Preparing for IPO and We Should Be Worried

#71

Post by JumpCrisscross »

vincent_s wrote: post #48
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's just not enough money in the market to buy all those shares What are you basing this on?

The amount of new shares for sale could be very large in those three IPOs: SpaceX: up to $75B [1] OpenAI: at least $60B [2] Anthropic: more than $60B [3] Together, that would be about $195B+ of IPO shares to buy. For comparison, all U.S. IPOs together raised $44.0B in 2025 [4]. All IPOs in the world together raised $171.8B in 2025 [5]. So where should the money come from? Either from selling shares in other companies…

> Together, that would be about $195B+ of IPO shares to buy...For comparison, all U.S. IPOs together raised $44.0B in 2025

Net buying of corporate equities by American households, trusts, funds and non-profits has averaged $660bn per year for the last few years [1].

[1] https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/20260319/html/f22... line 26, 2023 to 2025

Re: Anthropic Is Preparing for IPO and We Should Be Worried

#73

Post by JumpCrisscross »

cmiles8 wrote: post #36
WarmWash wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The market is going to struggle to absorb It's very unlikely, part of the reason why valuations are so high is because there is so much money, not just in the US, but globally, that is desperately seeking a place to park.

Yes FOMO and cash looking for a home did help drive up valuations to irrational levels. Public markets are a different animal all together. There are some concerned there won’t be enough willing to invest. That is a real risk given people smell a bubble about to pop. The other ironic risk is if the float is too small it creates an artificially high valuation by letting a thin, momentum-driven market price 100% of the…

> There are some concerned there won’t be enough willing to invest

I say this as a former public-equity derivatives guy, and now a private capital markets guy: I'm not seeing this seriously argued.

There is a real risk these companies are going out overvalued. But they're already overvalued in the private markets and arguably were even before near-term IPOs were on the horizon.

Markets can go risk off for any reason. If they do between now and these companies' IPOs, that spoils the party. But if they don't, there is no reason to suspect the risk capital driving into all manner of speculative equities, to say nothig of structured products and weird debt creatures, is suddenly going to hold the line at the darlings of the private markets.

> there’s talk that in that scenario SpaceX could end up with a 5T valuation

Where?

Re: Anthropic Is Preparing for IPO and We Should Be Worried

#74

Post by GrinningFool »

miroljub wrote: post #29
alex1138 wrote: post #4

I like Claude a lot. I hope it continues to be good

> I like Claude a lot. I hope it continues to be good I like strawberries. And car washing. I hope they stay unaffected by Claude's whims.

May have been better as: "I like stawberrries, and walking to the car wash to clean my car."

Re: Anthropic Is Preparing for IPO and We Should Be Worried

#75

Post by 999900000999 »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #58
999900000999 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft sells hardware. Surface laptops. Microsoft has spent a lot of time telling people to buy AI ready PCs. I just don't think it's in their business model to offer on device LLM. They want you to subscribe to Copilot. Which encapsulates the entire enshitication of Windows. Microsoft demands more money. Subscribe to gamepass, subscribe to OneDrive!

I'm aware of the Surface line, but 1) they don't own the hardware stack nearly to the same degree as Apple does, 2) it makes up only a small slice of the ecosystem and is a more premium product as far as PCs go. Windows ecosystem has far more variance in terms of CPU + GPU capabilities. I can see Microsoft pushing the subscription angle, but I do think there is a place for on-device capabilities since those will alwa…

I agree with your points. While I'm just thinking out loud, I can imagine either anthro or open AI releasing hardware for on-prem solutions in the near future.

I believe a few small companies have already specialized in this. But imagine a situation where maybe you pay a small subscription and Open AI allows you to download non open source models guaranteed to work to a degree.

It's going to be an interesting decade.

Re: Anthropic Is Preparing for IPO and We Should Be Worried

#76

Post by nradov »

Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote: post #17
afavour wrote: post #12

I hope price increases will mean we see serious moves towards open source and/or on device models. Feels like that's where we should all be headed but the current subsidy is a distraction.

I agree but with the current hardware pricing it is a big problem

Just be patient for a few years. Even with the end of Moore's Law, compute hardware pricing always declines over the long run.

Re: Anthropic Is Preparing for IPO and We Should Be Worried

#77

Post by JumpCrisscross »

Spooky23 wrote: post #32
WarmWash wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The market is going to struggle to absorb It's very unlikely, part of the reason why valuations are so high is because there is so much money, not just in the US, but globally, that is desperately seeking a place to park.

You're thinking backwards. The money is parked in these companies. They basically figured out a strategy to maximize return in an environment where the public market is dominated by passive capital. It's time for Google/Elon/Softbank/sovereign wealth funds, etc to cash out. For you, it's time to tilt to bond and value.

> an environment where the public market is dominated by passive capital

While by "the end of May 2024, passive mutual funds and ETF assets" had "grown to nearly 60% of the equity fund market" (emphasis mine) [1], only about a third of American stocks are held by passive capital [2]. (Index funds are about 16%.)

> For you, it's time to tilt to bond and value

Or just buy the market and watch the show.

[1] https://www.americancentury.com/institutional-investors/insi...

[2] https://alexchinco.com/double-what-you-think-it-is.pdf

Re: Anthropic Is Preparing for IPO and We Should Be Worried

#78

Post by SlinkyOnStairs »

the__alchemist wrote: post #33
cmiles8 wrote: post #3

It’s going to be an interesting period ahead. The market is going to struggle to absorb SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic and others. They’re just massive relative to typical IPOs. Maybe one can sneak through but not all. Someone is going to have to have a very bad day and it’s not clear who yet. Separately there’s a big battle to keep these folks out of the S&P index, because many funds (some of whom are required to buy ind…

Regarding S&P: That is my acute concern. For individual investors, they can be removed by taking an a short position corresponding to the stock's index weight. (I do this for TSLA). More broadly, it exposes people who only use index funds or don't have shorting in their tool box (passive investors for example) to big risk.

The risk is no longer a single company with a dumb CEO tanking.

Now the risk is a massive stockmarket wide collapse. Over a third of the S&P 500 is AI heavy tech stocks. With how reliant Nvidia is on AI compute sales, there's a real risk that at least 7% of the market disappears instantly, and everything else will hurt massively as well.

You can't hedge against that. There's a good chance this will have contagion solely from the sheer size of a dotcom style crash in our current stock market. Pension funds would start selling off their unrelated assets to cover their losses.

Nevermind any secondary concerns; How balls deep private equity and private credit are in AI. How useless the current US administration is at both economic and monetary policy.

Re: Anthropic Is Preparing for IPO and We Should Be Worried

#79

Post by zihotki »

999900000999 wrote: post #49
CharlieDigital wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple has the edge here since they fully control the hardware and can baseline their implementation. It feels like Microsoft's task is much harder because there's a much broader range of hardware and capabilities that they need to support.

Microsoft sells hardware. Surface laptops. Microsoft has spent a lot of time telling people to buy AI ready PCs. I just don't think it's in their business model to offer on device LLM. They want you to subscribe to Copilot. Which encapsulates the entire enshitication of Windows. Microsoft demands more money. Subscribe to gamepass, subscribe to OneDrive!

MS is more like assembling the surfaces, it's not the same as having a full vertical integration like Apple is trying to achieve with their contracts with Intel, in-house modem, etc.

Re: Anthropic Is Preparing for IPO and We Should Be Worried

#80

Post by cindyllm »

re-thc wrote: post #67
ReptileMan wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that SpaceX and OpenAI will be ok. Ukraine war showed that Starlink is the real deal - all of Ukraine's successes (or reversed losses) in the last few months are mostly due to Starlink cutting off Russia. OpenAI seem to have the tech on par with Anthropic and world class con artist at the top and access to more compute. So when the tsunami of Chinese models and silicone materializes - Anthropic will be most v…

> Ukraine war showed that Starlink is the real deal That held before SpaceX merged X, xAI and friends. Those are bleeding way more money than Starlink can recover.

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