The SEC's job isn't to adjudicate on whether Anthropic is a good or bad bet for investors. Its job is to ensure that investors have adequate visibility, and then get out of the way.
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.
> the number of Americans using AI at work fell significantly between the summers of 2025 (46%) and 2026 (33%).
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.
I'm seeing in offices, usage has gone down significantly. For alot of people, it takes more time to figure out how to get ai to do something vs just doing it.
I am only one data point, but I have been very intentional about significantly reducing my AI usage. Many other people in my network are doing the same where it's reasonable to do so.
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.
If I'm using a tool that in turn uses AI -- like how more and more office stuff has magic autocomplete, or how Teams does automatic transcription and summaries -- am I really using AI?
I think it might also be interesting to see a breakdown of how many people are using the free versions, the basic, pro and enterprise versions of which models from which AI companies and what they are using them for.
The link he provides is to a paywall, but bouncing over that, you can see the economist's lack of proper citation too, when they note:
> 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.
The SEC doesn't exist to play favourites. If Anthropic has broken a law they can be blocked for that. If not, then it would be unfair to them to block them for things that other companies with IPOs have done. Live by market primacy, die by market primacy.
There’s plenty of argument about how if a company has an IPO then they are, by definition, part of the market. And if you bought an index fund that means to represent a part of the market that this company is in, then that company should be in the index fund.
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?
Yes. There are too many people entire retirements on the line to hide behind the usual song and dance people do around this. What's the alternative. Let them proceed, the bubble burst, tank the market, then have the poorest and least equipped people to manage a recession just suffer? This is exactly what a government for the people could do. Or we could just keep letting rich assholes destroy everything with no consequences.
> What's the alternative. Let them proceed, the bubble burst, tank the market...
Yes. Precisely.
> ... then have the poorest and least equipped people to manage a recession just suffer?
Nah. Give them welfare payments.
Anthropic and its extremely rich investors won't need bailing out no matter when the major LLM manufacturers flop over dead... most of those folks became set for life ages ago. So, backstopping the Anthropic IPO would be an incredibly stupid thing to do.
If the little folks get fucked by Anthropic and OpenAI collapsing, then backstop the little folks and leave the rich folks to "muddle through". [0] They really don't need the help.
[0] I say this in full recognition of the fact that I'd be one of the rich folks who would be left to muddle through, despite not being anywhere near wealthy.
Do you really expect to learn something that you don't already know by making Anthropic do two quarters of audited financials? What happens then? Come up with another reason for delay?
The SEC is less of a protective agency and more of a revenue-generating agency (in practice and to some degree in principle). If Anthropic does not go public, you have nothing to stop them from receiving private funding from sovereign wealth funds. You have to understand that the Vision Fund failure did not mean that overnight sovereign wealth funds stopped making money; they are desperate to invest in private companies, and if you look at some of the, ahh... "stories"... you do not see massive non-Western investment in AI companies yet. But they are sitting on a mountain of cash.
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 the SEC allowed the SpaceX IPO they most certainly will allow the Anthropic IPO. From my point of view, the Anthropic IPO is a much more genuine one than the shenanigans that were going on with SpaceX, yet we’re all investing into that through ETFs as well.
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.
The only real argument here is that Anthropic has Q3 numbers but they aren't included in the prospectus because they may be bad. Delaying the IPO by a few weeks would solve that problem.
Seems like requiring an audit might be the solution to this issue? Why they (or anybody) can go public, with financials that are little more than a pinky-swear, is beyond me.
This author seems to be focused on if Anthropic will continue to grow and return value in the future. But it's disappointing that no one has questioned why they waited so long to go public. If they had gone public at a $100b evaluation, everyday people and pension funds could have invested in and seen the returns that AI has already delivered. Instead, Anthropic leadership runs around saying how AI need to benefit society as a whole rather than a select few, meanwhile they have kept the benefit of >$1t for themselves and refused to share it with others.
A year ago Anthropic was losing billions per year. I'm sure that if it had listed and then collapsed everyone would've gone "first they run around saying how AI needs to benefit society and then they dump a cash-burning company on pension funds"
But pension funds are already invested in them through the VC funds. The only difference is (more) people would be able to invest in Anthropic without paying management fees to middlemen.
Arguably if you consciously choose to invest on a stock there should be no protection or obstacle other than regulated controls. For indices I see the point of extra protection. Where it gets murky is when you look at retirement funds, where you still have no control, but that should be regulation on the funds themselves rather than the stock.
These days? All rules are maybe this or maybe that depending on political winds.
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.
If Anthropic can't easily pay all these commitments, what are the odds that they get all their creditors together and negotiate a mini chapter 11 (e.g. by adding 5 years to the commitment timelines, or canceling a proportion of each commitment)? The creditors have no interest in Anthropic going under, and with enough advanced notice, they can pause or cancel their own investments and probably take reduced losses.
The Russell indices, and other indices like the CRSP total market index, might include newly public companies like SpaceX, but the relative weight of them in the index will be float-adjusted, so a company like SpaceX that has kept a lot of its shares locked up will be underrepresented in the index compared to a more established public company.
It's going to get hammered into oblivion long before it gets to where it can end up on sp500. The election, and what happens after may see them delaying the IPO (if I was one to bet)
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.
This is so dumb. Let the market figure it out. If it goes public and crashes, we get a valuable answer that saves tens of billions of wasted capital investment. If it floats, the dude who posts nonsense math can keep filling his subscriptions.
Please edit the first sentence out. Keep it civil.
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
There's a 12 month waiting period plus the company has to show 4+ quarters of positive net earnings before qualifying to be included in the S&P 500. Pension and index funds are gonna be ok.
But we all know markets aren’t rational, I’m unconvinced we shouldn’t step in… if I started selling anthrax the government would try to stop me. This product might malfunction and show people how to make said anthrax which would be bad. Same with most things, everyone thinks this is a bubble. I think we should actually just put a cap on how much hardware data centres can buy per year, that would be the sensible solution tbh.
60 comments:
The SEC's job isn't to adjudicate on whether Anthropic is a good or bad bet for investors. Its job is to ensure that investors have adequate visibility, and then get out of the way.
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.
> the number of Americans using AI at work fell significantly between the summers of 2025 (46%) and 2026 (33%).
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.
I'm seeing in offices, usage has gone down significantly. For alot of people, it takes more time to figure out how to get ai to do something vs just doing it.
I am only one data point, but I have been very intentional about significantly reducing my AI usage. Many other people in my network are doing the same where it's reasonable to do so.
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.
If I'm using a tool that in turn uses AI -- like how more and more office stuff has magic autocomplete, or how Teams does automatic transcription and summaries -- am I really using AI?
I think it might also be interesting to see a breakdown of how many people are using the free versions, the basic, pro and enterprise versions of which models from which AI companies and what they are using them for.
The link he provides is to a paywall, but bouncing over that, you can see the economist's lack of proper citation too, when they note:
> 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.
The SEC doesn't exist to play favourites. If Anthropic has broken a law they can be blocked for that. If not, then it would be unfair to them to block them for things that other companies with IPOs have done. Live by market primacy, die by market primacy.
There’s plenty of argument about how if a company has an IPO then they are, by definition, part of the market. And if you bought an index fund that means to represent a part of the market that this company is in, then that company should be in the index fund.
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?
Yes. There are too many people entire retirements on the line to hide behind the usual song and dance people do around this. What's the alternative. Let them proceed, the bubble burst, tank the market, then have the poorest and least equipped people to manage a recession just suffer? This is exactly what a government for the people could do. Or we could just keep letting rich assholes destroy everything with no consequences.
> What's the alternative. Let them proceed, the bubble burst, tank the market...
Yes. Precisely.
> ... then have the poorest and least equipped people to manage a recession just suffer?
Nah. Give them welfare payments.
Anthropic and its extremely rich investors won't need bailing out no matter when the major LLM manufacturers flop over dead... most of those folks became set for life ages ago. So, backstopping the Anthropic IPO would be an incredibly stupid thing to do.
If the little folks get fucked by Anthropic and OpenAI collapsing, then backstop the little folks and leave the rich folks to "muddle through". [0] They really don't need the help.
[0] I say this in full recognition of the fact that I'd be one of the rich folks who would be left to muddle through, despite not being anywhere near wealthy.
Do you really expect to learn something that you don't already know by making Anthropic do two quarters of audited financials? What happens then? Come up with another reason for delay?
Maybe the stock market shouldn’t be people’s retirements?
The poorest least equipped people don't have money in the market. Are you suggesting the SEC is capable of stopping a recession from occuring?
The "the usual song and dance people" of letting people choose what to do with their money. Sure bud.
The SEC is less of a protective agency and more of a revenue-generating agency (in practice and to some degree in principle). If Anthropic does not go public, you have nothing to stop them from receiving private funding from sovereign wealth funds. You have to understand that the Vision Fund failure did not mean that overnight sovereign wealth funds stopped making money; they are desperate to invest in private companies, and if you look at some of the, ahh... "stories"... you do not see massive non-Western investment in AI companies yet. But they are sitting on a mountain of cash.
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 the SEC allowed the SpaceX IPO they most certainly will allow the Anthropic IPO. From my point of view, the Anthropic IPO is a much more genuine one than the shenanigans that were going on with SpaceX, yet we’re all investing into that through ETFs as well.
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.
If companies were already profitable why would they go public?
Same reason they take private investments or loans: To grow faster than would be possible without that.
To let early investors exit? Most private funds like that have a horizon of 10 years, so they want to sell their investments at some point.
public investment can be magnitudes larger than your profit, allowing growth that would otherwise not be possible
The only real argument here is that Anthropic has Q3 numbers but they aren't included in the prospectus because they may be bad. Delaying the IPO by a few weeks would solve that problem.
Seems like requiring an audit might be the solution to this issue? Why they (or anybody) can go public, with financials that are little more than a pinky-swear, is beyond me.
What makes you think Anthropic isn’t audited?
This author seems to be focused on if Anthropic will continue to grow and return value in the future. But it's disappointing that no one has questioned why they waited so long to go public. If they had gone public at a $100b evaluation, everyday people and pension funds could have invested in and seen the returns that AI has already delivered. Instead, Anthropic leadership runs around saying how AI need to benefit society as a whole rather than a select few, meanwhile they have kept the benefit of >$1t for themselves and refused to share it with others.
A year ago Anthropic was losing billions per year. I'm sure that if it had listed and then collapsed everyone would've gone "first they run around saying how AI needs to benefit society and then they dump a cash-burning company on pension funds"
But pension funds are already invested in them through the VC funds. The only difference is (more) people would be able to invest in Anthropic without paying management fees to middlemen.
Most 401ks and pension funds do not invest in pre IPO companies, this is just blatant misinformation
Better to dump it when valuation is low instead of inflated.
Aren't they still losing billions per year?
Does inclusion in S&P 500 even happen fast enough after IPO to matter here, thought there was usually a wait period before index funds have to buy in?
12 month waiting period plus 4+ quarters of profitable earnings before you qualify for inclusion.
No.
The SEC's obligation is to all market participants, not just index fund holders.
Arguably if you consciously choose to invest on a stock there should be no protection or obstacle other than regulated controls. For indices I see the point of extra protection. Where it gets murky is when you look at retirement funds, where you still have no control, but that should be regulation on the funds themselves rather than the stock.
These days? All rules are maybe this or maybe that depending on political winds.
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.
> Frankly, no company should be allowed to IPO without showing steady profit
This is directly counter to the original point of public markets at all
If Anthropic can't easily pay all these commitments, what are the odds that they get all their creditors together and negotiate a mini chapter 11 (e.g. by adding 5 years to the commitment timelines, or canceling a proportion of each commitment)? The creditors have no interest in Anthropic going under, and with enough advanced notice, they can pause or cancel their own investments and probably take reduced losses.
Are the pensions fund not "automatically" investing in anthropic as soon as it's public because it's in the S&P 500 (like spacex) ?
The S&P 500 denied early admission to SpaceX.
There's a 12 month waiting period plus the company has to show 4+ quarters of positive net earnings before qualifying to be included.
Spacex is not included in sp500 yet. Nasdaq is the one fast tracked spacex to dump on the retails
Many funds use Russel indexes, which included SpaceX already
The Russell indices, and other indices like the CRSP total market index, might include newly public companies like SpaceX, but the relative weight of them in the index will be float-adjusted, so a company like SpaceX that has kept a lot of its shares locked up will be underrepresented in the index compared to a more established public company.
Many funds use lots of indices. Very few dollars are being forced to buy these offerings.
I'm sorry, evacuate? In our moment of triumph?
It's going to get hammered into oblivion long before it gets to where it can end up on sp500. The election, and what happens after may see them delaying the IPO (if I was one to bet)
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.
> if I was one to bet
You can do exactly that on Polymarket and make good money if you are right.
Why do you think they will delay the IPO? I bet there's enough demand to buy their stock.
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This is so dumb. Let the market figure it out. If it goes public and crashes, we get a valuable answer that saves tens of billions of wasted capital investment. If it floats, the dude who posts nonsense math can keep filling his subscriptions.
Please edit the first sentence out. Keep it civil.
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
There's a 12 month waiting period plus the company has to show 4+ quarters of positive net earnings before qualifying to be included in the S&P 500. Pension and index funds are gonna be ok.
> mandatory purchases by the index funds
How many dollars do you think are forced to purchase these companies’ shares?
Maybe the SEC should instead block funds from distorting the market by making large predictable transactions, then.
But we all know markets aren’t rational, I’m unconvinced we shouldn’t step in… if I started selling anthrax the government would try to stop me. This product might malfunction and show people how to make said anthrax which would be bad. Same with most things, everyone thinks this is a bubble. I think we should actually just put a cap on how much hardware data centres can buy per year, that would be the sensible solution tbh.
The SEC should SEC to protect the public.