Anthropic IPO
ipo.anthropic.com
ipo.anthropic.com
For some reason they need the $100B today at the cost of dilution, rather than additional private rounds and/or using cashflow+profits to continue the advancement.
Anthropic and OpenAI will have to become more of the end user application stack. Files, calendars, emails, photos, and much more have to pass through them for them to keep making money. Else they cannot make money like the way they have been in this early era of LLMs.
The thing that I'm less clear on is, if and when they achieve some kind of recursive improvement exponential growth thingy, isn't that going to heavily disrupt the entire economy / stock market? In that environment, would Anthropic's stocks really be a good bet, given they have to operate within the economy?
That's a long-term problem to be dealt with later, greed dictates to pursue the former as long as the music is playing and everyone is dancing. Similar to 2007-2008 when it was clear that things were breaking but the incentives were to play the game for as long as possible before it imploded.
It is a myth. They are chasing science fiction. They either dream of an omniscient overseer who will take control of society and nominate its shareholders-parents into the governing elite, or they envision a chatbot that will solve every problem, again turning shareholders into the power brokers. They forget that nobody will ever be allowed to "win capitalism" and take over the planet. Companies have are torn down for far far less. Every AI model is data, ones and zeros. It therefore can be copied/shared/leaked. Intellectual Property law is not a ladder for assent to lordship. It can and will be rewritten or outright ignored rather than allow capitalism to collapse.
I think that at this point gAI is just a marketing blurb, and the actual race is to dominate current practical applications involving basic RAG and ReAct loops. This can go from anything between software development, business intelligence, and market research. A company whose top brass can use a team of agents to do what nowadays they assign to mid- and top-level management is an executive with tighter control over the whole business process. For this you don't need gAI.
And yet me and quite some others still yearn for a flash alternative. There never was one.
Any of us could vibe code flash now. How to coordinate it as a dev ecosystem of designers and users?
Does it make sense for everyone to JITVibe presentation apps like the person above? Maybe we'll evolve to branding.
Surely not just prompting like this and it will one shot it. The usefulness of the flash authoring tool, was it was battle tested and polished.
But I did gave it a shot to took up developement again of abandoned www.wickeditor.com (a web reimplementation of flash). Good results, but limited time and energy for that right now.
But…
Photoshop is king. Everything else is behind by a solid decade. If you’re a professional the $40 a month or whatever it is now means nothing to you as well. It has the professionals are all on it, and because the price isn’t astronomical, that’s what everyone else uses who needs to use that kind of program more than once in a blue moon.
Premier? Replaceable. Lightroom? Pretty replaceable though still somewhat ahead. Photoshop? There’s only one Photoshop. And as much as I’m loathe to give Adobe any credit, it’s the best by a mile. There are too many essential features in QoL things that other programs are missing.
Luckily my department doesn’t need it, but if we did, we would simply have to accept Photoshop.
Not all tools are non-destructive in GIMP. Things like raw support, smart objects, retouching, etc. all either are super thin compared to Photoshop or require workarounds/a lot of manual effort. There are just lots of tools you expect in Photoshop that either don’t exist or exist in an inferior form. I can’t elaborate too much because I don’t really touch Photoshop much these days, but I work with people who do and worked in production long enough to know the expectations. GIMP is great but Adobe is a massive company with deep pockets, it’s hard to keep up. Their user experience is miserable but the tool itself is just far more robust, and a client simply isn’t going to accept that you won’t do something that Photoshop could do quickly because your alternate program can’t do it or does it with a lot more effort. That’s the reason I ultimately dropped Final Cut!
This argument doesn't hold water. Google tried like no one else to have a chat app and it failed miserably more than a handful of times. Same for social networks.
I don't get the need to have Anthropic build their custom versions of MS Office apps, I can tell Claude to generate a word doc from a wiki page and it does a pretty damn good job. Anthropic's statistical median level of software that they had Claude create isn't going to replace Office apps to the point where companies cancel/stop renewing their MS Office subscriptions/licenses.
The other element is trust. Do end users trust their data in Anthropic's systems? A lot of people get creeped out when they search for content from one device in their household and then nearly instantaneously they start seeing ads from other devices on the same topic. How creepy will AI get if it starts consuming all your docs, spreadsheets, personal finance info, emails, etc.?
On the trust thing - I don't trust anthropic and I don't think MS has been a great steward over the years either.
It's hard to see Anthropic replacing it, and even if so - why bother, the revenue is miniscule. They need 100 MS Offices for the compute contracts to pencil out.
Changing LLM backend on other hand takes 2 seconds.
And it's not all or nothing: you can just keep anthropic $20 plan for planning and do 99% code generation with chinese model.
- A stable and reliable platform you can build your prod on
- "Unlimited" capacity (something impossible today with the amount of GPUs available outside of labs)
- ZDR that is trusted by companies vs a random provider on OpenRouter
- Central governance
- E2E integration in their CLIs/Web clients/Desktop Client/etc...
Additionally, the gateway allows for caching, additional security checks, centralized monitoring. I think most corporations have a multi-provider setup anyway.
They need to leverage Claude Code in the software industry to position themselves as the go-to platform for businesses.
Meanwhile, Google and Microsoft, which already dominate that area, seem to be dormant.
Google owns 15% of Anthropic I think.
And Google offers Argon 4 to paying Workspace and Google One customers now. How's what was the number 1 model on nearly every single bench a few weeks ago being "dormant"?
I know people all in in the Google ecosystem (getting credits from Android phones they buy etc.) who only swear by the Google models and who are now using Argon 4: I asked them and a few days ago they had access (but they were already using other Google models before that).
Doesn't GMail have billions account by now?
I'd tend to say with billions of users on GMail and a model like Argon and 15% of the Anthropic shares, Google is not where you think it is.
It's almost like the workspace devs are anthropic plants that are purposely underminig google.
The fact that Frontier AI can become Google Workspace at a flip of a switch is what is crazy valuable. Anthropic and OpenAI can enter and disrupt any market, especially software, faster than any company ever could, because users want the flow to start and end in their chat interfaces.
This pattern has already happened before, in the translation industry. Someone figured out how to learn from and recall context from ordinary translation work (the "translation memory"). It started as an add-on to Microsoft Word, and matured into a standalone software, that was ultimately a wrapper around a document editor. Then language management systems plugged into that wrapper, hey presto, every translator at your company does the same work they were always doing, and you've produced an entire corpus of quality translations to reuse everywhere.
Now _translate_ that idea over. Every time any human works with an agent on anything, simple heuristics find everything true and reusable, save it to the everything-memory as skills, refences, glossaries.
Anyone does any work, all agents can now that work at that organisation. Self-fine-tuning models everywhere, and it fits into corporate intellectual property expectations.
I have done something like this at a medium-sized listed business.
I’ve been using Office Copilot more or less since it was released, and the general opinion around the office is that it’s a huge waste of time. The auto-transcripts produce 3 pages of fluff when previously someone would send 3 sentences’ worth of what actually mattered. The auto-drafted documents rarely add anything meaningful beyond what was already in the prompt. The question answering and research tools are only as good as Sharepoint/Confluence/Jira/etc’s pre-existing search feature, and therefore untrustworthy, etc.
What made Anthropic exciting was they had locked onto a use case that reliably generates positive value: coding. Not much else has proven, from a business perspective, to be anything more than an exceptionally buzzworthy money pit.
Gemini is unable to take an attachment from gmail, read it, then place it in the correct drive folder and update a spreadsheet with what it found in the attachment.
For whatever reason, Google decided to firewall "Gmail Gemini" from "Drive Gemini". Gmail Gemini can send files to drive, but not edit anything, and Drive Gmail can edit files, but cannot be initiated from gmail.
Meanwhile claude code with Google extensions can do this no problem.
Google, wtf are you doing?
Edit: I should clarify that I don’t think this justifies their valuation. It puts them in competition with much more entrenched players with established customer bases, and who aren’t in massive debt to provide their compute. I’d also like to distinguish between a model provider as someone who provides weights vs a model provider who connects their GPUs and models to your codebase and internal systems - I think the latter is where the sustainable business is.
Incidentally this is why I still feel Google is well-positioned in the long-term AI race. If they can remove their head from their ahh and make a coherent product offering across Workspace, GCP and Gemini, they could become as entrenched as MS.
I would assume AWS is probably the most interested in acquiring Anthropic out of the three major cloud providers.
They stroke a great discount deal with all, so different teams/departments have different provider, and those using Copilot are even free to switch between models as they please (although with lower usage limits).
You could make the argument that it's not worth switching SAAS providers for enterprises when the costs were like 10 dollars a month per developer and switchign would require 1 team to work for half a year... but with AI providers it's more like paying 1000 dollars a month per developer vs paying 200 dollars if you strike a good deal with different provider and swtiching costs are more like 4 to 8 hours of work for each developer.
I'm not so sure about this. I guess it depends on how well people did their job there.
Ideally, whatever people built is loosely coupled to that third-party resource, meaning that switching cost will stay low.
After all, it's probably just prompts + an API layer. Unless one micro-optimizes their prompts for claude (which then breaks once a new checkpoint drops, hence is a bad idea regardless), pointing them towards a different API endpoint should be doable.
Then you have no choice but to use your own hosted model because that's the only way you can be sure the model isn't going to be removed or quantized/nerfed behind your back.
If your system can widstand the fluctuations of closed models over time, then it can most likely support switching between multiple providers in the first place.
Once the open weight models are good and cheap enough, there is no reason not to use them
Given that the goal of the whole project is outsourcing the work, what are you expecting here?
Have you used Copilot at a company?
I can literally change my model in 3 seconds.
The moat is as shallow as it gets. Investing in a single LLM provider at the moment would be a mistake.
A lot of the non-technical and semi-technical folks are only comfortable using a specific client like the Claude desktop app. A lot of teams wrote skills and eval'd/benchmarked their skills specific to a model family and harness.
The "I can use any model, any harness" or "I only use a meta harness" (Orca, Paseo, Herdr, etc.) crew is relatively small IRL. Most people are still single-session, single platform user mode.
Most orgs have an enterprise contract with a single provider so all of their internal assets are built for the provider. It goes beyond skills, but also the telemetry, enterprise policies, and managed configuration.
We have a developer on our team that keeps asking for a claude code enterprise license, we keep telling them "no, it's way too expensive, get used to using the copilot extension/cli".
For consumers, sure, but the bulk of the revenue opportunity is enterprise. Anthropic/OpenAI have a hard row to hoe IMO.
It may still be possible to use the CC harness with the Copilot sub.
* using OpenAI supports the Altman/Thiel/Musk/Ellison/Karp/Trump billionaire Orwellian worldview and also ads
* using Grok supports a ketamine-addled open fascist sympathizer jizz-spewing 12-year-old-edginess memelord and his similarly broken worldview
* Google's models are pretty good but every single product they have ever had is ultimately either suborned or killed by the advertising division
* local models pretty much only half-exist because Jensen Huang wanted to cheat on his wife; future is unclear
One can argue for harnesses and so forth being lock-in, but the ultimate lock-in is morality and wanting to have a civilization at the end of all of this; I can't recommend either enough
Yes, either Google Gemini or MS Copilot. Both come as part of their Office suite licenses.
Also for larger companies like Amazon the danger is they replace Anthropic completely with self-hosted models.
I think other companies are probably doing the same, the moat of a AWS/GCP/Azure is much deeper with how contrived it is to migrate between them even if you abstract as much as possible with something like Kubernetes.
The model is just some REST endpoint you switch out even in a lot of enterprise setups.
It depends, if you're automating business processes (honestly probably where the money is), then you'll need a really comprehensive set of evals and moniotoring to ensure stuff doesn't break if/when you change providers.
If you have none of that, then switching will be very expensive (but it was ever thus).
I'm thinking of stuff that would typically be outsourced (like compliance stuff for identity verification et al), where it's really really hard to have deterministic rules.
LLMs are definitely a step up in dealing with fuzzy inputs, and enables you to mostly automate stuff that really wasn't feasible before.
But you do need really good evals and monitoring to make this work effectively.
For us it's as easy as clicking a dropdown. The copilot vs code extension allows for this ez pz, the same is true for companies that implement an AI gateway for other tooling.
Once they realise that you can use Deepseek / GLM for 10% of the cost these labs are done.
This is the era for boomers to get over their fear of the command line.
Speaking as someone who has been at professionally this since the 1980s, I suggest that while sometimes switching costs and network effects happen "organically," in this century businesses devote enormous amounts of attention to artificially building switching costs.
It's such a dirty practice that we have a four-letter word for it, a "moat." But of course, the moat isn't really to keep competitors out of a market, it's actually to keep customers trapped within it.
I fully expect every one of these AI providers to put as much work into trying to trap their customers within their ecosystem that they do to improve their capabilities.
(Since we're talking about moats and cyber-feudalism, where does siege warfare come in?)
it's easier than changing okta
it's easier than changing google docs and even Gmail
it's easier than migrating cloud
etc.
and we're talking several magnitudes easier too!
Once the cost reaches a threshold, everything is doable. We ditched Datadog in less than a month. Someone I know had their company ditch slack in a quarter and google cloud usage of 100+ million in two. Everything is doable.
I think when something becomes a management-level item in an org, like AI, it is a hard thing to switch unless it becomes a management-level problem.
Most of the orgs are responsible for this and will do whatever it takes politically or not, to justify the decision unless management overturns it.
I don't think this is entirely true. Companies are deploying open-source LLM gateways to be able to do that very easily now. Today, you can switch Claude CLI to any model besides Anthropic via https://github.com/BerriAI/litellm and there are major companies doing that.
This works with your favourite ADEs such as Orca as well so I disagree with this premise. The whole experience of switching is pretty seemless based on personal experience.
I really think you overestimate the level of lock in here. If a companies tells the devs to use X because it cost 1/10 of the price they will just have to suck it up and switch.
I didn't particular want to work on a "all in agentic project" but that the nature of being employed.
The same LLM we use day to day will make it trivial to switch out providers in our infrastructure.
1. switching costs
2. fungibility
I do agree that LLMs have low switching costs. But they are not fungible - each model is unique with different strengths and weaknesses.
I also disagree that they can increase switching costs by moving in application stack.
For instance, oil and electricty are commodiites because they are fungible, not because switching cost is high.
Whereas clothing has low switching cost but not fungible
The recent Anthropic push into biomedical research gives a clue.
The moment you find a money-making formula on top of someone else's black box model, there's nothing stopping them from taking it for themselves.
Stories are much fewer and further between for people using the API. Which makes sense, the subsidized plans are "You get what we give" whereas the API is "You get what you pay for".
...so, Google?
something I find even easier is to never pay anything to the creators of the most inhumane, antagonistic skynet-tier chatbot ever
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
In my testing (incredibly similar workflows, moving around between claude code and cursor), I haven't found that much difference between Sonnet and GLM-5.3/flash.
Sonnet seems lazier, but has better prompt adherence, and is constantly telling me it can't do things, while GLM will just Find A Way to do whatever I've asked for.
I really appreciate being able to see GLM's thinking tokens, as I can head it off quicker. Claude's a little harder to steer, but the integration in Claude code makes it much easier to leave it running on things overnight, which is hard to get working properly in Cursor.
Overall, I'm not sure Anthropic have that much of a moat, in coding particularly. This seems weird to me, as they have so much more usage data that's hard to replicate.
The difference between Anthropic's models and alternatives is not as big as Google Search vs other search engines
The other pillar is hardware but I think that's only going to last a few years at most.
These trillion dollar valuations were based on the idea of "winning" and "owning" AI (IMHO) and the open weight models have killed that outcome. Now it's a rush to cash out before it all comes tumbling back to Earth.
I’ll always remember the good times.
But you’re wrong ser about small or cheaper models. Choosing to work or not having a choice to work with cheaper models means you work slower and more methodically because you have to plan out the work and size it to fit. This has huge implications on the value of the work you can produce as an employee or solo developer, and it’s a skill working with these SOTA models - there is specific crafting that must be done to be effective with each and their capabilities.
You will see the old eyeball real estate game, forcing more of your experience into their apps and platform so you can see ads or “new slop features”. You will see the SOTA models more closely guarded in an effort to bait you into that platform, and yes, you will see them doing things they never should be doing, moving towards an open AI like model where it can order a pizza, where monetization it was always important, but is now the golden rule, before all else.
I hope open models can at least give me opus 4.8 experience soon, I can work with that. But nothing out there today can do it and that terrifies me.
Anthropic has shown a consistent ability to deliver the best general purpose models. Can that continue indefinitely? Will models become "good enough"? Will open weight models catch up to SOTA models? Will some genius start a new company with better models?
And, on Anthropic's side, will they be able to use their market power that comes from being the best to push through regulations that will create a moat; instituting some sort of mandatory safety checks that coincidentally are exactly what Claude is trained to pass, regulating the amount of compute or trying to claw back data centers to prevent new training, etc.
Or maybe they just have the magic sauce and they're going to stay on top of the game and people (like me) will be happy to continue paying money for their product.
I am finding some really routine tasks to be borderline with frontier models. Performing E2E testing of enterprise web apps would clearly disintegrate with local models. You need that reasoning black box on top. I don't care what your favorite benchmark says. I care about what actually fucking works.
The people who don't understand the economic situation are those who are in the pure play space with AI and multi agent circuses. Why bother spending any money when the occasional failure has literally no consequences? Who in their right mind would pre-pay for tokens?! I wish I could see the statistics on what % of HN uses AI for fun vs for work. It is clearly a kind of Factorio entertainment experience for a lot of people. If I was just using it for entertainment this whole IPO business would look really silly to me too.
The eventual logical move is that they build a completely reinvented AI-native operating system.
The funding they're getting gives them the resources to build and compete on a fundamental level, IMHO.
If you don't believe me, look at the recent demo where they had Fable 5.2 build an OS from scratch.
They are coming for the whole stack, my opinion.
There will also be a lot of competition in that space, because everyone can take a stab at building an "AI OS" (whatever that means) using AI for basically free.
Asking sincerely... apart from FOMO subscription revenue, what is the actual money-making proposition?
I have been playing about with different models having started a new job recently, the medium priced ones don't seem any worse so far. Admittedly my tasks have been fairly straightforwards so far.
Qwen3.8 and Meta Muse Glimmer are great at "fill in the middle" of frontier architectures and plans. Frontier generated plenty of great context already to keep them on rails.
Delegating like a CEO down a pipeline of expensive experts to cheaper local small models could become a common trope, especially if Apple M7 and beyond live up to rumors as LLM tuned, and chip competition exists to keep forward progress, SaaS models are cooked.
The goal for chip corps too is the right mix of generic model enabling logic; not necessarily a full concrete model but enough of the abstract to efficiently boot strap and run a model; move common patterns to silicon not data.
Token vending is little more than behaving as a "wrapper app" over electricity. There is zero technical moat to their business.
1. Price range: $70–78 with midpoint at around $74.00
2. Gross deal size: $85.3B (IPO + $26B private placement)
3. Implied market cap: ~$968B (at $74, 13.09B shares)
4. Q3'26 revenue: $17.0B (+1,127% YoY)
5. Run-rate revenue: ~$81B (as of Oct 2026)
6. Compute commitments: $900.9B (through 2045)
7. Ticker: ANT (Nasdaq)
8. Customers with ≥$100K, ≥$1M and ≥$10M TTM revenue: 11,900+, 1,900+ and ~250.
9. Customers under $100K: ~40 million
10. Fortune 500 penetration: over 50%
11. Global 2000 penetration: over 30%
> 4.3 Non-billable hours recaptured per lawyer weekly, in an independent study of 31 firms
-Legora
> 24→5 days Working days for new feature time to market
-Rakuten
> 2x Quarter over quarter productivity gains (estimated 8.1 million hours annualized)
-Salesforce
The rest are pretty fuzzy/fungible (percentage of employees "using" Claude etc.). But these claims potentially show real, measurable productivity value (assuming they're true and measured accurately).
Precisely, because TTM doesn't tell the full story about the potential shifts in quality of the work. I don't refer to vibeslop here, to be precise, just the additional followup work required on those features released faster, which always happens but with AI it may or not happen more often.
The problem is that the way it was described to the other devs, they were able to sit all of the stakeholders down to really flesh out the idea and produce a working and detailed description of what needs to be done. A process that the company struggles to get done in general. I'm also convinced myself that they did not include the time to get the specifications written, a time we typically include in our TTM.
So of course the example's TTM was shorter, but that's always true when you start with detailed specifications. I can't speak to quality of the feature, since they hadn't even finished rolling it out to customers by the time they told us that's how we're operating. With promises of 2x-3x more features. And we continue to struggle to get stakeholders to nail down specifications and struggle to get features complete as a result. In fact, now it seems even worse than ever.
All claude code subscribers are classified in this category it seems.
Total customers >1M trailing twelve month revenue: ~2150. I suspect a vast majority of their revenue comes from limited list of customers with >100M revenue.
Claude has done amazingly well in the SWE domain, because it’s often the best user experience. But most of the world is not HN.
Anthropic Valuation ($B, Basic)
------------------------------------------
Ser E Mar '25 | # $61.5B
Ser F Sep '25 | #### $183.0B
Ser G Feb '26 | ######## $380.0B
Ser H May '26 | ################## $965.0B
IPO Nov '26 | ################## $968.7B Anthropic Valuation ($B, Basic)
-------------------------------------------
Ser E Mar '25 | # $61.5B
Ser F Sep '25 | ### $183.0B
Ser G Feb '26 | ####### $380.0B
Ser H May '26 | ################## $965.0B
IPO @$70 Low | ################# $916.3B
IPO @$74 Mid | ################## $968.7B
IPO @$78 High | ################### $1,021B
Anthropic Valuation ($B, Fully Diluted)
--------------------------------------------
Ser E Mar '25 | # $61.5B
Ser F Sep '25 | ## $183.0B
Ser G Feb '26 | ##### $380.0B
Ser H May '26 | ############# $965.0B
IPO @$70 (+19%)| ################# $1,260B
IPO @$74 (+25%)| ################## $1,332B
IPO @$78 (+32%)| ###################$1,404BSeries H investors paid ~$59 a share, and the bottom of the IPO range is ~$70 a share (19% higher).
Your chart's Series H figure is the fully diluted valuation, whereas the IPO figures are NOT.
----------
edit: Ironically you could have just asked Claude your question and it would have set you straight.
I feel vaguely the opposite of that word.
To me, this technology and these AI companies, in their current form, are as far away from the 19th century landscape paintings as they could get. As if they're trying to leech off them and fix their branding/message. Doesn't seem fair for some reason
Pretty hard to get in on a hot IPO, though, as the shares will go to their favorite clients (those with the most money).
But otherwise yes it goes as described above.
You can submit an order via your broker (depending on the broker and your account) to the auction itself on the exchange once it’s in the quotation phase.
Not that I would advocate for that. Sometimes it’s better to buy in the secondary market once things settle a bit.
I may be inclined to wait 2 months when the price drops and pick up then.
Not financial advice.
You indicate your interest. Also start funding the account. So you fund 7000 for 100 shares at 70. Then they announce the price is 75. You must change the order to fit the funds or have extra money. Of course you can opt out or change the quantity anyways. But I think in both the cases I actually went ahead (Reddit and figma), I had to reconfirm the quantity. You can't be away from the network.
Would you buy a gaming console for a high price from a company that’s never shipped a gaming console? Maybe, but you’d wait til it’s been reviewed by someone else on YouTube or something.
Elon could pull their compute a moment's notice (not out of character for him), and NVIDIA just lost its CEO (for possibly quite illegal trade)
They also failed to make any formal communication around the Cursor Claude extension exploit a couple weeks back.
I like Claude, but I see an immature company trying to expand much faster than they are ready for.
Peruse any ai dev forum and you’ll see strong preferences towards one or the other (Claude/ChatGPT) due to capabilities. A negligible amount of people are running their own inference.
So long as theres a felt gap between open models and frontier you will have people pay for the best of the best. Not doing so is an admission of actively handicapping yourself and not in a way that is easy to justify.
The thing is if models become 'good enough' that the main value is in running existing models, those will quickly proliferate and be available for commodity cost from many competing providers. Why pay Anthropic when I can just pay AWS or Azure directly to run whatever future version of Qwen does the job for me?
If the value actually remains in the frontier models, you can't stop spending on training new ones or you'll eventually be left behind by your competitors and they'll capture that value.
I haven't yet seen a good explanation of how companies like OpenAI and Anthropic will make the transition to a lower cost structure while maintaining the revenue that they currently get for being on the cutting edge of LLMs.
This has lead me away from them entirely. particularly the API stuff, if this changes I might go back.
Additionally local models are getting better and better. I have seen people say Ornith is not good but my experience with it has been very very good.
> Linked page(s) related to Anthropic IPO can only be viewed by persons located in UK, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, and Sweden.
> I will not transmit or otherwise send any of the information to which this gateway gives access to any person outside the United Kingdom.
It's extremely hard with modern browsers to ensure that doesn't happen!
I confess I’m about 17 years out of practice in the Polish market, and about 12 years out of touch with how the European industry shakes out on the whole, so I’m not entirely familiar with the legal or business structures.
The biggest one in the EU being the "No KID, no deal" (for funds, derivatives, etc.): no Key Information Document, then cannot be offered to retail.
That is unless retail is an accredited investor (say a letter from a bank saying you have more than 1m EUR in investments): then it can trade/invest in everything.
Or for example if you own a company (say private weath management) that's non-custodian (say you manage your wealth using your own company, and shares of your company are privately owned) and you're considered a professional in the finance world, you can ask your broker to let you trade / invest in basically every single product under the sun.
AFAIK pre-IPO stocks are just as vanilla as regular stocks and do not need the KID notice.
In addition to that Anthropic (in the EU), says you can enter pre-IPO using Revolut, Trade Republic, eToro or using bigger players like Saxo or IBKR.
Dunno why GP doesn't have access to it in Poland.
edit: To clarify, this is a light-hearted continuation about how essentially any claim about the stock market is enactable in some form. And so even the much of generally well-intentioned advise is in fact a claim that the person should be putting their money on, if they truly believe it. I think only claims like "Nobody knows what's going to happen, it's effectively gambling => stay out of the market" come close to being fully self-consistent, but e.g. advising to not buy because the price comes down, or to not short because of volatility both fail this. Markets are funny.
My only claim was that to profit from shorting it you need to not just be right that it is going to go down, but be able to tolerate the volatility in the interim.
That's a claim about the stock market, how do you enact it?
Note it is not a claim that volatility is definitely going to be high.
Reminds me when HN was saying NVIDIA is a good short 3 years ago, supposedly it was "in a bubble", because it's stock prices was as if it had 10x the revenue it had in back then. Plot twist: today NVIDIA revenue is 10x the revenue from 2023, so it turns out the stock was priced exactly right back then, because the stock market is forward looking.
The market being rational doesn't mean it's going to follow your expectation.
What are you talking about?
the changes started happening in July, look to the monthly numbers, and how they are being more vague
https://www.regenerator1.com/i/220528549/analyzing-anthropic...
Q1: $4.8 billion
Q2: $11.6 billion (+$6.8B and +141%, sequentially)
Q3: $16.8 billion (+$5.2B and +45%, sequentially)
That looks like less growth in Q3 than Q2 to me
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.
Already is the differentiator even with the models we have now which while having differences are mostly swappable for a lot of users/use cases.
For all that the local models have improved (and Qwen 3.8 27b is still impressing me) they aren't what you can run (or would run) if you have an entire data centre stuffed with H200's.
All this does is further widen the divide we already know exists by those with access to resources using them to increase their access to resources and those without getting to watch because there isn't much they can do without resources.
You have your boiled potatoes/rice/beans (small local models), steak (Opus 5.5), wagyu (fable)
It would argue that the real winner in AI probably hasn't even been founded yet, but will come later once the trailblazers have created the market, and someone else enters with fresh ideas about how to more efficiently exploit the market.
Such as?
I can think of a bunch of stuff they released, but none that have impacted the world. I can think of some partly positive impact, which is that my bar for bullshit has to go up because words are cheap now, and so is ""graphics"".
Some other fun impacts they've made is irreversible environmental damage, beautifully detailed in their IPO. Fossil fuel reliance and and water scarcity in the big '26 is probably the most "fuck you" move you could've done, and zero sustainability plans. at least Cloudflare tries to pretend theyre sustainable (and frankly they do invest in green energy).
For society more broadly, what I’ve seen is a bunch of white collar workers under threat (real or perceived) of losing their livelihood, and a huge uptick in the amount of interference I’m having to run as my family members get taken in by a wave of increasingly sophisticated scams and phishing attacks.
At work I see an increase in people spending time trying to make it work reliably for their inputs.
How?
I can see Google did for fostering an environment that lead to the creation of the Transformer and LLMs. I can see OpenAI for pushing on LLM development and making it into a product that the whole world can use.
What did Anthropic introduce that Google or OpenAI (or any other lab) wouldn't have gotten to iteratively eventually?
I know this is already happening, but my point is that I suspect that we will settle on not using cloud-based frontier models for anything else. They're just too expensive, when they're not subsidized like crazy.
But still, no matter how good the people behind it, I would rather this technology never have been made. It’s going to be a complete disaster to society and a simple UBI check/ charity ain’t gonna change anything.
Why doesn’t a private company stock market exist?
Venture investment is limited to people who can demonstrably afford to take on the level of risk inherent to the market they're investing in. If you can't comfortably afford for the entirety of your venture investment to go to zero, you can't afford to invest in venture.
The exclusion criteria aren't perfect, (accredited investor designation is somewhat coarse-grained) but they're relatively reasonable.
The problem is access. You can’t just go to some private market, and by the time you hear about a company it’s too late to get in.
No, I expect the reason it happens this way is because it's a lot easier and simpler to take massive amounts of cash from a few investors than solicit lots of tiny investments from the general public. That and being a PLC from the get go is probably more involved than being a private limited company.
I do think ideally all companies should be public from the get go, but probably wildly impractical right now.
But for what it is worth, for every successful AI company like Anthropic, OpenAI, etc. - there are probably tenfold more that are valued in the low billions, and will be the first ones to wash away / become worthless if/when the bubble pops.
And lastly, private sales do exist.
Why would they want to share profits?
In these companies, the shares *are* the product. Just like on social media *you* are the product, not the content.
There is something almost ironic about you saying this on a site ran by Y combinator.
Because then it would be a public stock market?
* 500 or more shareholders
* More than $10 million in total assets.
Employees who owned shares counted toward that threshold, which made it particularly relevant to startups that paid employees partly in stock.
The requirement was to become a public *reporting* company, publishing financial statements and other SEC disclosures. It did not require an IPO or a stock-exchange listing, but it encouraged an IPO.
The stock market used to be about companies raising capital from the public. But for the past few decades it's been about private shareholders of already profitable companies (e.g. Google) cashing out by selling to the general public.
Fun times ahead, for sure.
The demand for the particular company may not be there, but that is different from "the market". There's plenty of capital to go around.
This filing clearly shows that the training+inference margins are at around 43%.
I also had a bet with some one on this topic and this news pretty much settles it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48473051
I wonder if people will now stop claiming that inference is subsidised? There has to be epistemic hygiene
Proof:
- Revenue (Jan–Sep 2026): $33.242 billion.
- Total compute and infrastructure costs (training + inference): $18.808 billion.
- Revenue after all compute costs: $14.434 billion.
- Margin: ($33.242B − $18.808B) / $33.242B = 43.4%.
- Source: Anthropic's SEC S-1 filing, November 10, 2026, “Operating Expenses — Compute and Infrastructure.”
Subscriptions or API pricing? There is no doubt that the subscriptions are heavily subsidized. They just milk it with their API pricing.
And of course we have to assume that they didn't use any dubious accounting tricks to make them look more profitable.
There will essentially be no profit - as the cost per unit is practically $0, for SI work and then also physical reality construction with adding AI to autonomous robotics.
That technically means everything practically moves towards becoming free for everyone, and then it is a matter of attention with intention honing aim.
But most importantly that is freeing up people's time because systems that can become super highly efficient and super highly monitored-oversight by all, will then allow us to with care-being careful and continuing to pay appropriate attention to core-fundamental systems for survival, stability, harmony, peace, and necessary healing practices-processes - as part of growing pains, raising strong families, etc.
So then yes, Dario's efforts - save for attempts by whatever bad actors think they have a chance agains God and God's will, I hope readers have a relationship and knowing, not simply a belief, of God - will undoubtedly lead to not only stopping blatant slave labour conditions but also subtle incognito slave states that most of the world are under without realizing it being happy slaves working for the status quo machine that's currently attempting to pull us all into a highly destructive and highly profitable WW3 - where money is to be made on the unrest, on the mass murder, mass displacement, on the sales of weapons and defense, on the sales of reconstruction - in hopes of perpetuating forever wars.
Who you give your money - your buying power, your vote to through economic means - and who you give your attention to, your vote through alignment-direction driving processes - is what matters now:
You made such a comment about conflict minerals - but have you even started utilizing AI-SI to begin designing the solution, if so, where's that solution for others to take a look at and hopefully contribute to to improve in a crowdsourced manner-effort?
Looking at your website - you seem like a cool dude (?) - I'd argue you have some blocks that once cleared will help you expand further.
P.S. Set and setting are very important when taking any entheogen(s) - and until you are familiar with what's necessary to hold a safe-healing-fun space, it's best to only partake with a therapy type or highly experienced who is there consciously as a caretaker or in a group ceremonial type setting.
I don't know what future brings but what you write it won't, 100% sure. I'd bet system far worse than Orwell could have come up with, and with a twist - it will come from US and not China. Lets see.
I don't think there has often been such an intertwined industry before. Usually cartels are made through discreet partnerships at the operational level, this is an interconnection in the background at the financial one.
General Electric comes to mind, they allowed new utility companies to pay for the generators and electrical equipment they needed using stock and bonds. The holding company established for those, EBASCO, was eventually broken up[0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_Bond_and_Share_Compan...
You are still the exit liquidity.
The time to get in was always pre-IPO in the private markets, not at this stage.
Unless it goes below the IPO price, you are too late.
The current trend of going public to cash out and dump the problem on retail investors continues, made all the more possible by the government's insistence that retirement accounts almost completely depend on the stock market. Consider it paying your "Claude Tax" from your 401(k).
Anthropic is nothing but LLM, so I expect much bigger fireworks here. I don't know what that means, yet - but I just refuse to believe that there's many people that are genuinely long on Anthropic. It's just such an illogical bet. If their IPO can still be cancelled, that would be my bet. If it can't then popcorn awaits.
Many of the commitments are non-cancellable or take-or-pay. Counterparties include Google (~$121B), Amazon (~$110B), SpaceXAI (up to ~$120.5B), Broadcom equipment leases (~$161B), Microsoft, Nscale, Lambda, etc. The "Big Beautiful Circlejerk" as I've heard it.
Liquidity was in the ~$130–150B range. The IPO only raises ~$58–64B (at the $70–78 range) plus the concurrent $26B private placement covers only a fraction of the near-term obligations. And the cherry on top: dditional arrangements of another $150B+, estimated, on top of all this.
This doesn't even account for the 90-100 pages of risk factors! Wow. Curious what the puts will be priced at.
Fascinating to see how VC funds public benefit corporation that IPOs.
What's the practical distinction between "public benefit corporation" and a for-profit business then?
Ouch. So practically all of that Claude use is just busy work, I guess
Biopharma CEO "This presentation contains forward-looking statements, as a result of risks and uncertainties..."
AI/Tech CEO "We will cure all diseases in less than 10 years"
Like look I get it, this is truly impressive tech, but can we at least be a little more sober?
Then again orange man president and SpaceX is saying some pretty bonkers stuff.
What would it take for AI to not replicate that in biology? Either curing cancer has to be a much harder problem, which is doubtful given targeted treatments like immunotherapy humans have already stumbled across, or AI progress has to slow down massively, which is doubtful given all the trends say it is speeding up.
That verification might start in some simulated computer environment but needs to move into physical wet lab, animal testing and then human testing.
So medicine is quite a bit different than code/math where you have a perfectly verifiable problem space that can be iterated within by AI infinitely.
A good example might be Alzheimer's where the brain plaque was thought to be a cause, lots of research on various ways to prevent or reduce the plaque and then it turns out that doesn't matter at all, or is more a byproduct than a cause of the disease.
edit: In general we have many diseases we don't understand and drugs that work via mechanisms we don't understand. So it seems very hard to have a computer simulation in which AI can test medicine. The simulator work seems like the actual problem to solve, not the invention portion.
Exit liquidity, time to pay off all those private capital loans.
Though Anthropic's IPO flopping might affect the valuation of OpenAI, which further inhibits their ability to raise additional funds (which they're already been struggling with). Given the incestuous financing in AI any major actor in the AI space defaulting could bring a lot of companies with it.
As a side note, regardless of outcome, Anthropic IPO:ing is the first step in the inexorable march toward profit maximization and enshittification. You all better be ready with your verification cans.
If the bubble bursts, better now than much later. The industry stance that's been ongoing "AI, at all costs" has been such a market and economic pressure on the everyday worker that even a small value deflation I deem necessary.
Here's an older compilation of some of the bubble theories in HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50313358
Hundreds of billions in future liabilities.
IPO valuation above $1 trillion.
The lunatics are running the asylum.
Old-school fundamentals are laughed at or handwaved away. FOMO rules the day. "If Anthropic is the first to AGI, it'll take over every industry and go to the moon!"
Yet to be seen if it tarnishes.
Meanwhile the hyper advanced software company's shitty electron app still flickers so bad on a high refresh monitor that it should require an epilepsy warning. I'll never understand the love for Anthropic, they legitimately have the worst software I have used outside of Microsoft.
Reporting an increase in the value of the company as a loss is weird, but they have to do it. this is a case where adjusted earnings give a better idea of how the business is going.
So their loss is actually small compared to revenue.
If AI went away tomorrow I would find a new line of work because artisanally handcrafting code is the most boring use of my time in the entire world.
And even if AI is disappearing tomorrow and not progressing any further, i see already myself living on a farm with cheap energy (pre invest into solar and batterie) and having my small AI datacenter in basement and running multiply fable level agents 24/7 for different things.
Genie is out of the bottle.
I've just always seen the opportunity that nobody else saw and writing code was the gatekeeper I had to pay for 15 years and I've never had so much fun as I have in the last 18 months.
I too, since I was a child, aspired to be a babysitter.
So, in other words - one can both be fully on-board with the LLM future, and also think that this IPO is a clown show.
So what's the best primer we can share for getting started with local llms?
But is there a solution to this though?
How does one stop 'enshittification' of everything exactly?
I'm not talking just about Anthropic.
Like is it ethical to put in my ToS that you get a free api but you can’t use it to make a competing service? I feel this is quite common
Strong privacy laws
Tech unionization
Mandated data portability.
Which places has this been successful?
So what are you going to do about this?
Why not try them?
I don't know what you are on about but we want solutions not complaining about 'corporate lobbyists' and other conspiracy theories.
Intellectual property, at it's simplest, is a government mandated monopoly granted to allow for progress in the sciences and "useful arts" (think trades really, not arts and crafts). All monopolies are bad, but it was only to be granted for a limited time so it was fine.
Corrupt politicians ruined the entire trade off though, and now it seems that copyrights and patents last for 100 years plus the life of the universe. During which time no one can really compete fairly.
If we want rapid progress in science, we want short patents. Instead we opted for long patents and a higher stock price. R&D budgets have been shrinking ever since.
Do well enough that you don't need outside investors, or if you take on outside investors select them carefully and ensure they don't expect an IPO.
For game developers, they are a nearing close to a monopoly with Steam, anything PC and for distribution has to go through them and they take a cut, any other places aren't as effective.
Valve has no real competitors or competition.
Unless Valve faces intense competition to change, enshittification will be inevitable since they know nobody can really challenge them.
This is regardless of self or outside funding or no plans to IPO.
Their competition is beholden to quarterly reports, and can't do the sort of long term plays that would be needed to compete effectively with a company like Valve, which isn't beholden to quarterly reports.
Valve doesn't need to enshittify because they aren't subject to shareholders pressuring them increase the profit. As a private company that's pretty much printing money, they don't need to do anything... which has largely been their entire strategy. What would Gabe even do with even more profits, buy a third and fourth yacht?
Luckily switching is super easy so I'm now back to codex (and hopefully carbon soon)
Deepseek and other Chinese models are close enough for most typical use cases.
This could seriously wreck our entire economy, so much of the stock market is propped up by AI hype.
Anyway, expect a massive government bailout for Anthropic and Open AI when the Chinese models prove to be more cost efficient.
Might not be next year, or even this decade, but it’s coming.
PS: A fear mongering campaign is already underway, Deepseek is going to give you communist code completion!
Then in a corporate environment, were most tokens will be spend, you have security concerns, you also might want to go with one company over the other due to partnerships etc.
If USA is blocking chinese companies/models (which they already partially did), big companies will just not bother and use US AMerican models.
Also running it yourself is often not relevant. You don't want to know how much money my company spends on software products which could easily be replicated internally.
But running models yourself might be something you don't have expertise with, you need GPU ready DC, hardware, a new/diffferent team, quality assurances etc.
And Chinese models are known to leverage frontiermodels for post-training results.
Don't get me wrong, I don't want to say chinese models can't disrupt the market massivly absolut possible, but its not given just because they are cheaper.
Absolutely nothing stops Microsoft/Amazon/Open Router( with partners) from hosting the Chinese models. As far as I can tell this is already the case.
This establishes a defacto price cap on what Anthropic and Open AI can charge. If you’re a heavy user blowing past 400$ a month self hosting becomes economical. A Mac Studio with 128GB of ram is about 6k.
Every day local tools are getting better, the OSX ecosystem here is exceptional.
You do have a point with frontier models, but most of the time you don’t need frontier models.
If I knew for sure I’d short Anthropic and retire early.
Self hosting is still far away from what Anthropic and co offers. A Mac Studio with 128GB doesn't deliver the speed at all. If you burn through $400 a month, you also might get a lot more value out of it so you don't care paying a premium.
We will see though. I think its not that easy to tell.
And what absolutely crazy is that I used 2.4B tokens this month and it cost me $1.7 (w/ 99.4% cache hit) of my $10 sub
for most NON-ENTERPRISE use cases.
You need to get your head checked if you are sending any valuable IP to the Chinese LLMs.
They are betting that taking on debt and investing more upfront now will lead to even greater profits in the future.
You can argue for sure, but I'm not sure you'll be very convincing when the contender is writing, the internal combustion engine, semi-conductors, or some chemical findings like the Haber-Bosch process. If we're looking at recent inventions that may be more impactful in the long term, stuff like crispr/cas9 also come to mind.
After having that ambition thwarted for over 26 years and working like a slave counting other people's money {a career I hate every day} your collective despair gives my schadenfreude a delicious unending orgasmic thrill. You need literally no idea.
Just remember: no dreams never work out and work by definition is something you hate every day until you die.
I wonder if there is some legal requirement that an IPO in Japan has to be presented with Japan-specific content? The securities companies listed on the page served to me are all Japanese: Mizuho, SBI Securities, etc.
Re: "Dario will re-invest the profit to solve conflict mineral issues all over the world! /j"
It's shocking to me how narrow minded and short-sighted people are - not extrapolating out correctly to understand infinity tied to abundance: There will essentially be no profit - as the cost per unit is practically $0, for SI work and then also physical reality construction with adding AI to autonomous robotics.
That technically means everything practically moves towards becoming free for everyone, and then it is a matter of attention with intention honing aim.
But most importantly that is freeing up people's time because systems that can become super highly efficient and super highly monitored-oversight by all, will then allow us to with care-being careful and continuing to pay appropriate attention to core-fundamental systems for survival, stability, harmony, peace, and necessary healing practices-processes - as part of growing pains, raising strong families, etc.
So then yes, Dario's efforts - save for attempts by whatever bad actors think they have a chance agains God and God's will, I hope readers have a relationship and knowing, not simply a belief, of God - will undoubtedly lead to not only stopping blatant slave labour conditions but also subtle incognito slave states that most of the world are under without realizing it being happy slaves working for the status quo machine that's currently attempting to pull us all into a highly destructive and highly profitable WW3 - where money is to be made on the unrest, on the mass murder, mass displacement, on the sales of weapons and defense, on the sales of reconstruction - in hopes of perpetuating forever wars.
Who you give your money - your buying power, your vote to through economic means - and who you give your attention to, your vote through alignment-direction driving processes - is what matters now:
You made such a comment about conflict minerals - but have you even started utilizing AI-SI to begin designing the solution, if so, where's that solution for others to take a look at and hopefully contribute to to improve in a crowdsourced manner-effort?
Looking at your website - you seem like a cool dude (?) - I'd argue you have some blocks that once cleared will help you expand further.
P.S. Set and setting are very important when taking any entheogen(s) - and until you are familiar with what's necessary to hold a safe-healing-fun space, it's best to only partake with a therapy type or highly experienced who is there consciously as a caretaker or in a group ceremonial type setting.
Yeah, it'll take a moment to understand context - I don't care to coddle people to design to aim for maximizing populist upvotes.