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.