Unless you're accusing Anthropic of misconduct in their financial reporting obligations I fail to see the connection.
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 absolutely agree. But it's entirely irrelevant, because there's no "must be this (hand gesture) sophisticated to buy IPO stock" rule.
Legally, no. Practically, all underwriters have account minimums and tenure requirements. The only exception is direct listings.
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.
Are we to believe the only reason they aren't making a profit is because of competitive pressure? Why would I believe they don't have the same structural issues as Anthropic? That should certainly be the base case assumption even if there wasn't so much evidence of the same kinds of deals and problems.
They have to raise prices and lower expenses or there's no advantage to being a monopoly. I don't think corporate customers will pay higher prices and I see no evidence that they're actually capable of lowering expenses.
They're welcome to stop training anytime and show us how efficient it is to do inference only.
And that you couldn't subsequently do antitrust against OpenAI.
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?
If day of the week is important you get more consistent results this way.
I don’t have a particular point of view on this but the people acting like this is weird or some big deal have clearly never spent much time with financial filings. There are much weirder scheduling things than this. Some companies split their reporting quarters up in unbalanced ways for instance.
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.