The SEC Should Block Anthropic's IPO to Protect the Public
techpolicy.press
techpolicy.press
It would be VERY BAD if we gave politicians arbitrary veto power over who IPOs and who doesn't. The threat of corruption should be obvious.
"Founded to help our country respond to the Great Depression, we’re the agency that protects investors from misconduct, promotes fairness & efficiency in the securities markets, and facilitates capital formation for those looking to hire, innovate, and grow."
Adjusted revenue figures are reported all the time for many different reasons, there is absolutely nothing special about this and I've not heard ANY financial analyst explain why GAAP is a better number here. You are salivating over a total nothing-burger.
Also, if you didn't hear, their Q3 results were spectacular and were included in an amendment today.
I'm not an Anthropic fan-boy and I won't be buying their offering but you've picked just about the two least relevant things in this offering to complain about.
The reasons to be skeptical of this offering is what is described in the TFA: Anthropic is committed to spending 900 billion on compute over the next decade and if they can only profitably employ 80% of that it will utterly ruin them. Dario is putting all the chips on number 12. If he is right though - and inference usage explode by 1000x Anthropic has so much scarce compute locked up that they will do very, very well.
> “Run-Rate Revenue” is an operating metric that refers to the estimated annualized value of our revenue-generating activity as of a measurement date, calculated as the sum of (i) our consumption-based fees during the trailing 28-day period ended on the measurement date, multiplied by 13, and (ii) our aggregate monthly subscription fees as of the measurement date, multiplied by 12. For purposes of calculating Run-Rate Revenue, consumption-based fees and subscription-based fees are derived from customer usage and active subscriptions.
> trailing 28 days multiplied by 13
I’m not aware of a year that has 13 months of 28 days? Why would you ever calculate it this way?
This is generally true of any growing time series. If you don't want this look at the audited GAAP figures.
If they make, say, 10x more on weekdays than weekends, using a 30 day month with two extra weekdays overestimates annual revenue since it translates to a year with 264 weekdays as opposed to 260.
That's about a 1.5% increase.
Footnotes are not some minor FYIs. In financial literature, they’re just a formatting choice. They’re fully part of the document.
It's an IPO, the P is public. The information needs to be consumable by the public. The level of knowledge that can be expected of a random IPO stock buyer isn't the same as that of a VC or private fund.
And that's exactly where the SEC comes in. The 1930s went wrong enough, no point in doing a 2030s repeat.
Public-stock buyer or IPO buyer? The latter tend to be sophisticated.
I'd wager that the 95th percentile, and maybe the 99th percentile anthropic IPO participant, by volume, is a more sophisticated stock evaluator than either you or me.
The only way to respond to that is to let them crash but then you have an even bigger problem: OpenAI will have an actual monopoly on frontier models in the West.
Everyone gets audited financials before the De-SPAC process occurs.
That's VERY GOOD.
Right? Right.
Then they’ll take your money and piss it away because A) it doesn’t belong to bureaucrats; so they’re spendthrift
B) bureaucrats are not gonna use what they buy; so it’s shit
do you know how expensive private jets are to operate?
Destruction isn't the opposite of bail out, it's just destruction. The government is obligated to do what society wants. From this destruction would come creation by freeing up capital to do more productive things than waste money chasing fantasy rather than providing free school lunches or free university instead (you know the actual things that would generate economic value).
Not how the rule of law works!
> Notably, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC), tasked by Congress with investigating the causes of the financial crisis, cited moral hazard as a component of the crisis, arguing that many factors, including deregulation in the derivatives market in 2000, reduced federal oversight, and the potential for government bailout of "too big to fail" institutions all played a role in increasing moral hazard in the years leading up to the collapse.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_hazard#Connection_to_the...
Still... something strikes me as just... well... morally wrong about that.
Didnt the US govt cause the crisis by refusing to regulate derivatives because their donors didnt want it to be regulated.
People will learn risk-aversion vicariously, or end up living with the consequences of an inflated hubris. =3
Not that I think that applies here, just that they go beyond making sure everything has accurate filing and disclosure etc. and do have some mandate to look into the business models themselves in some cases.
Like I would ban controlling share classes. I guess there could be an exception if they had an aggressive conversion provision that turned them into normal shares as the company grew.
You also omit an important constituency in your formulation. Corporations are extended limited liability with the idea that it will benefit the public. The government absolutely should be taking steps to ensure that this is true.
Any reason why? To be honest, they never sit well with me either, but not sure what my argument would be for banning them. All investors are well aware of what they're putting their money into.
Otherwise you're subsidizing oligarchs by cutting investors off from kicking the board the next week if/after it's caught acting against the share holders.
Gensler spent his entire time at the SEC doing exactly that type of adjudication.
Wasn't his war against SPACs' limited financial disclosures and conflicts of interests, i.e. the way companies went public, versus against any issuer per se?
Surprising. I couldn't find the study they're citing, and they didn't include a link. Anecdotally, my friends across various industries (tech, finance, medicine, scientific research) are all using AI more heavily as time goes on.
> A survey by Jon Hartley of the University of Texas at Austin and others has found that about 33% of people now use AI at work, down from a peak of 46% in mid-2025.
Some people are being railroaded into more AI usage by mandate of their organizations, not because they're actually getting personal value out of it.
ETA: I still don't think the SEC should get involved in what companies should or should not be allowed to list publicly beyond certifying that the company is not materially misleading their investors.
The gifted use it and do better/greater/more, while the less "gifted" can't seem to get too much out of it, or things that are passing novelty at best.
(At least that's how I read it)
Here's the relevant paragraph from that story:
> Yet those numbers may have recently levelled off. In May economists at the Census Bureau reported that “ai use remained relatively steady in many sectors over the last six months.” A survey by Jon Hartley of the University of Texas at Austin and others has found that about 33% of people now use ai at work, down from a peak of 46% in mid-2025.
Coincidentally I posted an updated chart of AI use according to the Census Bureau this morning - https://simonwillison.net/2026/Nov/2/census-bureau-super-int... - they changed their methodology in December but the numbers have been trending up in 2026.
As for the "survey by Jon Hartley", I think that's this one: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5136877 - "Job Loss Fears in the First Years of Generative Artificial Intelligence".
They surveyed ~24,000 people with the question "Do you use generative AI for your job?", then later asked which of the following tools they used:
ChatGPT, Midjourney, Claude, Gemini, Github Copilot, Scribe, Embedded products, DeepSeek, Apple Intelligence, Meta AI (Llama), Adobe Firefly
After even more digging, I think I found the raw data for their survey in the Internet Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20250910015550/https://generativ...
Frustratingly, it looks like that only has their 2024 and 2025 data - the 2026 data is what would show that "33% of people now use ai at work" number quoted in the Economist article, but https://generativeairesearch.org/ no longer loads and the Internet Archive don't seem to have captured anything later than 2025.
I am not qualified to make a judgement on the research quality, but it strikes me as a little weird? And also weird to cite when trying to create an "AI is stalling" narrative, because the text of the paper doesn't really support that at all.
The claim seems to be based on a single figure that the authors present as additional context in an appendix, which shows the trends of four surveys, in which only one of the four shows a decline. The authors don't even seem to think the decline is significant enough to comment on except to say that "the plateau in late 2025 reflects declining interest and correlates with google search trends for ChatGPT and Gemini" (which they also show using a chart that does not look like a plateau or decline to me at all).
The methodology and survey questions are included, the numbers seem to be based on a straightforward "Do you use generative AI for your job"?
It's weirdly ChatGPT and Gemini centric, the word "Claude" only appears once, in a definition, and "Microsoft" and "Copilot" are nowhere to be seen. I don't know how much to read into that, it just strikes me as weird and noteworthy in a paper that by its own admission is detecting a trend that is the opposite of everyone else doing large scale surveys on the topic.
Recent example is the time they took time to wrap their head around Cloud. Now look at the revenues they generate for Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Oracle etc. Early days.
The number of people using AI at work could fall to 5%, but if those 5% of people were keeping Claude busy all day and night the overall expenditure on AI could increase.
The growing AI revenues don’t require everyone at the office to be using it. If the software engineers are each spending $10K a month on tokens, it doesn’t matter at all if Bob from HR is doing $0.50 of Copilot queries every day.
To be honest, whether a company is operating well or not will become clear after it goes public.
At the same time, only with financial transparency can there be better supervision.
Also, this is one way for everyone to participate in AI construction and development to some extent.
I would buy some Anthropic stock. I don't care whether it goes up or down, but I want to be part of it, and I also use their products.
Or, if you insist on keeping your claim, then when the SEC is playing "favorites", it's "the favorite set of rules", not favorite companies.
Now, however, these IPOs are so big that straight away they're at like rank 10, or 15 or whatever. The investors who own the S&P don't experience any of the upside when they grow from rank 500 to 10. They are only exposed to the downside (if they lose value/rank/fall out of the index) or the marginal upside if they continue performing and generating returns.
The point is that given the size of the IPOs relative to other companies, their addition to the index has a much more downside exposure than reasonable upside exposure.
I'm probably butchering my explanation here, so apologies if it sounds odd.
Additionally, some ETFs have built in protections to rule out businesses that are not yet profitable (like SpaceX and Anthropic), which I think is a great rule.
SpaceX made that even more clear by doing an explicit offering of shares to raise money just months after their IPO, which didn’t raise them any money at all but was just for investors and employees.
> SpaceX made that even more clear by doing an explicit offering of shares to raise money just months after their IPO, which didn’t raise them any money at all but was just for investors and employees
SpaceX raised $85B at their IPO that went all to the company. It was a primary stock ipo so it was all newly issued stock from teh company included teh 15% additional shoe.
The only IPO's i can see on file where companies didn't raies money were 3 direct listings
- Georgia Banking Company (GBC)
- avion Healthcare (DAVI)
- TurboGen Ltd. (TRBG),
If you know any of those companies you are deep into the cash equity markets:)
If I am remembering my history correctly, the first company to go public with a multi-billion dollar valuation while being unprofitable was Netscape, which kicked off the dotcom bubble.
Greg Brockman, OpenAI's president, gave Trump $25M.
Dario Amodei gave Trump a hard time.
Do the math...
You had lots of choices, you made this choice, and you can always change your mind. Do we really need to have the government step in to prevent you from having to choose something else?
I believe that the Anthropic IPO price will be too high, but also in the long run it might turn out to be a great investment.
The most important thing I believe is that this is what I signed up for when I bought lots and lots of VTI. And that I can change to a different set of investments pretty much instantly for 9 hours a day, 5 days a week. With no tax hit because it's in my retirement account.
I don't think that's what avg 401k holder is doing
Why do you think you don’t already have more than that many months of audited Anthropic financials?
The alternative is don't invest in them?
Or, if you are this certain that they are going to fail, then short their stock. You could make millions.
The core thesis is all assets are part of the market. Public and private. The challenge is rebalancing cost, which is driven by transaction costs. Having a tiny percent of every single asset rebalanced every single second is great in theory, since you'll be diversified across the market as a whole, but you'll also lose all your money in fees.
This is why the S&P 500 exists. It's a limited number of names that are very liquid, i.e. transactable at scale at reasonable cost. As trading fees went down we saw larger and larger indices.
A real risk is the market cap, including insider holdings, being large enough to force the stock into major indices. That makes the stock a must-buy for index funds. That in turn props up the stock regardless of how crappy the financial position and how small the float. That was controversial when Space-X went public. It went into several major indices despite not really being that big in terms of revenue.
That being said, I don't think the government should be involved unless it's to unilaterally ban these "public" companies where shareholders do not have equal voting power with 'founders'.
If people want to invest, let them invest.
Why? Nobody is buying their shares without the opportunity to review both sets of data.
Moreover, every branch and division across the US government recognizes one thing... the public market is plateauing. It is not a numbers thing; it is a sentiment thing. The post-pandemic tech boom needs to continue, at least be stabilized. AI's expectation to hit the public market is largely keeping a lot of the momentum going.
If Anthropic does not enter the public market, it is going to be a major distressing event for SEC who make money from regulatory fees and a shit ton of fees from publicly listed companies. There is zero incentive to stop them. The SEC tries its best for the benefit of publicly listed companies, exchanges, brokers, institutional investors etc. who all benefit from the IPO.
If an online tech journalist can figure out this sort of thing, with the information available to him, maybe so can members of the investing public?
And the ones who don't are just going to be victims of their own greed anyway.
This is kind of desperate. The argument falls flat.
Maybe this is true for most businesses, but that's because most businesses are not really leaning into agentic AI yet. It seems software devs started to use it in 2025 and OpenAI and Anthropic have tried expanding the use cases with their GUIs and webbased agentic systems, which I think means there is incredible growrth opportunity when the masses start adopting it.
It may take a few years though.
Like the S-1? Where it clearly shows the auditor's opinion where it goes in every S-1? Because pretty much every company going public (through a IPO) in America needs to have audited financials [1].
Frankly, no company should be allowed to IPO without showing steady profit. An exchange or index that promotes IPOs of unprofitable companies diminishes its reputation, and the reputation of all other stocks it indexes.
Anthropic is free to continue selling shares privately. They can setup a website and take cc payments if the care so much.
This is directly counter to the original point of public markets at all
Pensions do, individuals don’t.
“Less than 1% of the $14 trillion in assets in the defined contribution retirement system is invested in private markets, compared with approximately 24% for U.S. public pension funds and 17% for private pension funds as of 2023” [1].
[1] https://bipartisanpolicy.org/article/the-role-of-private-mar...
Like, I can tell you definitively pensions are pretty broadly invested in Anthropic specifically through a number of funds.
This is such a bizarre thread. Did you know they're going to release Q4 results after the IPO? IPO buyers won't even know those numbers until after they buy! (Unlike the the Q3 figures.)
Oh but sure it’s for a good cause
Genuinely surprised they didn’t ask us to “think of the children”
—
In all seriousness, I get the argument that Anthropic is likely foisting a huge liability onto Americans via the ETFs in their retirement plans that’d pick up $AMADEO because it’ll be large cap. But if we’re gonna make that argument, it needs to be by sector or by risk class, not targeted at a single company.
It's a "Junk stock". They should let it crash and burn.
Just distill their models completely. They have no moral high-ground at all there.
CRSP adjusted their methodology prior to SpaceX IPO being announced. It's part of a larger discussion about what the purpose of an index is and how people invest. Vanguard is not out to screw people's retirement up (quite the opposite really). Anyone is welcome to be part of the discussion, but it's hard to get anyone to take you seriously if you only come out of the woodwork when something "bad" is about to happen.
it absolutely exists, but was renamed
> CRSP adjusted their methodology prior to SpaceX IPO being announced.
important part is when SpaceX ipo plans were decided, not announced to clueless public
The index drama was mostly a creation of influencers.
I'm not doing it again for Anthropic. The finance/crypto influencers have clearly found a pitch that entertains.
For SpaceX, $5bn of U.S. funds and $9bn globally were "forced" to buy [1]. Out of $200bn total buying over the first three days [2].
[1] https://www.pouyabehmaram.com/articles/spacex-forced-buying
[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/18/5-wild-spacex-stats-from-the...
As far as your claim, it's fine to say let the market sort it out, but perhaps consider that pension funds and index funds now represent a market distortion that means anthropic crashing is harder and even if it does would happen after the mandatory purchases by the index funds which is basically a transfer from the public to the insiders at anthropic
How many dollars do you think are forced to purchase these companies’ shares?
That's why people want the IPO to be blocked because we've seen what happens before.
Why does OpenAI getting a bail-out depend on its registration status?
But it also sort of doesn't matter. Anthropic, not in sp500, ends up a fail then the "bubble" pops and the sp500 gets ugly.
You can do exactly that on Polymarket and make good money if you are right.