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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

#81

Post by SlinkyOnStairs »

WarmWash wrote: post #15
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…

>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.

> part of the reason why valuations are so high is because there is so much money

The primary mechanism behind that is liquidity; Passively held assets decrease liquidity, and with there being a lot of passively held assets, liquidity isn't so great.

There are some warning signs that demand for AI companies, especially OpenAI, may not be so high as expected. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-01/openai-de... (Though OpenAI asserts that the demand is low because the seller isn't trusted)

On the other hand, it also seems like OpenAI and Anthropic are seeking to have a relatively "small" IPO by not selling too many shares. The market may absorb a few tens of billions. The big questio is how long it'll take for more of those companies to hit the market afterwards; They're burning through their money awfully quickly, and the earlier investors will want out as well.

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

#82

Post by zaphar »

miroljub wrote: post #24
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.

There is no subsidy in interference. Serving existing models is a highly profitable business. The proofs are many independent companies serving models for profit. What is expensive is model development and training, but again, that's nothing inherent to technology. It's just that Anthropic and other western vendors made a business decision to use cheap investors money to brute force a new model development and market…

Many of the chinese developers are just drafting off of Anthropic, OpenAI, and Gemini though. Distillation is leveraging those models to achieve their leaps in training. It's not obvious to me that Anthropic and do the same. Someone has to build the advanced model to draft off of.

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

#83

Post by Forgeties79 »

rvz wrote: post #13

After Anthropic achieve's "safe" AGI (A Giant IPO). Those token prices are NOT going down as I am predicting [0] Why would they? They need to pay for the increasing costs and the high demand for running Claude and soon it will be reflected in their earnings releases. So every token cost counts and the subsidization era of tokens will eventually end. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46886918

The real test is going to be anthropic’s IPO + when Microsoft charges for copilot on June 1. I think a lot of companies are going to learn people are not interested in paying for these tools because they just aren’t consistently useful across-the-board. Like 3-D printing it will thrive in certain industries but will not have nearly the broad appeal and daily use they promise investors.

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

#85

Post by [deleted] »

SlinkyOnStairs wrote: post #78
the__alchemist wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sol…

[deleted]

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

#86

Post by bzmrgonz »

okdood64 wrote: post #84
bzmrgonz wrote: post #69

Am I correct in thinking it's a race to who launches IPO now? I mean among the SOTA models. Especially since OpenAI has been given the all-clear by the court.

So you mean just Anthropic vs OpenAI?

you're right, the other SOTA's are megacorp whic have no interest in spinning off their AI to stand alone.

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

#87

Post by jollyllama »

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…

Then Anthropic will gain, people will profit take, and it'll all flow back out to everything else.

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

#88

Post by the__alchemist »

SlinkyOnStairs wrote: post #78
the__alchemist wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sol…

Those are great points. Regarding > You can't hedge against that:

Not by shorting individual stocks, but you can by deleveraging in general. Stop using margins or options, hold a larger portion of your money outside the blast zone like account balance (hopefully with interest), bonds, international.

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

#89

Post by yytt32 »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #73
cmiles8 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Curious.

What would you consider a fair value? Would be interested to see your valuation approach

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

#90

Post by [deleted] »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #71
vincent_s wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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