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.
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.
How will 'the market' figure it out when these companies have been directly angling for the too big to fail line? The end result is that they'll get a bailout due to national security interests or something so that the economy doesn't completely shit itself and then we're on the hook for it.
That's why people want the IPO to be blocked because we've seen what happens before.
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.
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.
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?
Look, if it makes you feel better, I'm happy to state that I thought the SpaceX IPO price was too high and that it is probably still too high. But in the long run, it might turn out to be a great investment.
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.
There is a difference between SoaceX and Anthropic. The former is objectively ahead of competitors by many years while Anthropic is at best by few months and pressure from open weights models is increasing.
So even if one believes in AI the rational choice is to invest into hardware that AI companies needs (GPUs, gas turbines, batteries, solar panels)
Pretty gross seeing this kind of paternalistic view get so much agreement on HN. The "poorest and least equipped people" are invested in the stock market? Give me a break.
The wealthiest Americans have never owned so much of the stock market, with the top 10% now holding a record 93% of US equities, according to Federal Reserve data.
the bottom 50% of Americans owned just 1% of all stocks and mutual fund shares
> There’s plenty of argument about how if a company has an IPO then they are, by definition, part of the market
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.
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.
Even if so, human endeavors like the SEC are supposed to play favorites according to specific, well-established rules. At that point, it becomes a bit of a stretch to call it "playing favorites".
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.
> when the SEC is playing "favorites", it's "the favorite set of rules", not favorite companies.
Oh buddy, if you don't like that, then I have some bad news for you then when it comes to executive agencies' authority to unilaterally develop and implement rules. Not just the SEC, but every executive agency just has to have consistent rules. Legislation is super vague, often intentionally.
Even before Chevron was overruled, you basically had to just not be "arbitrary and capricious" and follow procedures like public comment periods, even though you don't have to listen. Now that Chevron has been overruled, the unitary executive theory has taken hold in the Supreme Court, so there's probably a majority that might even say a unitary executive agency doesn't even need to follow the arbitrary and capricious standard.
Not saying this is good, just what has long been standing precedent.
The concern is that “bad apples” get into indices and then that starts to rot people’s futures. I’m not sure how that will play out (indices can kick them out, or if the company really fails the market cap will reflect that and the index can “heal”). I’m guessing Enron was part of the index at some point, but we survived that.
Well as we already saw with SpaceX, indices are separate entities that are not fully controlled by the SEC. There are plenty of companies on the market that aren't in indices anyway, you don't need to block a company from the market to block it from the index.
People keep saying “bad apples into indices” but I have yet to truly understand what folks mean. Most of the mainstay indices would not include a fresh on the block new comer and it would generally need to follow other criteria. Yes SpaceX got added to the Nasdaq 100 but that is the whole purpose of that index. People should not be investing their savings in that.
What they mean is that when a company becomes part of an index, like the S&P500, historically, they come in somewhere around approximately rank 500. The S&P naturally results in more buying of winners and more selling of losers, so anyone who owns an S&P ETF will own that stock when its approximately rank 500, and will own more and more of it as it grows to be a bigger part of the index (higher rank).
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.
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"
Even if they are losing money, if they went from $10b to $2t in evaluation, that's still $1.99t in value that has accrued to insiders rather than the general public.
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.
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.
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.
> That is something obvious to add on relevant public materials
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].
I think people were not satisfied with that one in S-1. It excludes this year completely and run-rate revenue and net revenue retention not verified, which is kinda big thing. They claim 900% NRR.
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.
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.
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.)
> 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
It's the railroading that's being decreased. Various tech orgs are pushing back on everyone in the company pushing PRs as they realized is profoundly wasteful and unfair for people to push 10 PRs and then just dump it into someone elses lap to validate. "Claude already made a PR for it" doesn't hold up when you can't make a meaningful judgement on the output. Not every org is there yet, but my read is its happening at places like Goldman.
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'm pretty exhausted by the amount of prompting it takes to get Opus 5.5 to do some things the way I want it done. And I'm fighting against a complex system no human wrote. Claude also writes Jira tickets and voluminous comments that no human reasonably understands, so it's all become a huge clusterfuck. Nobody even runs the project locally so we can't even review the changes until they hit a dev server 30 or 40 minutes later. Been at this company for 8 years and this year has turned into a complete shitshow thanks to the CTO drinking the AI kool-aide. I'm looking for a new job.
I presume codebase is for something critical to your company. To give full keys to the company to unproven foreign entity and lose control of codebase for good... a fireable offense to say the least
I have the impression that the gifted can leverage AI a lot more than normal people. My early views about AI were that it would democratize intelligence, but now my opinion is that it will be a huge catalyst for the gifted people, increasing social and economic differences.
From personal experience, what I've seen is the opposite. The less "gifted" attempt to lean on AI to close capability gaps, with results that are amusing at best, and disastrous at worst.
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.
> 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.
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.
Its too early to tell what value will be found especially in large corps, where lot of the institutional knowledge that needs to be transferred into these systems is not straight forward to extract and encode.
It effects who has power in different parts of large systems. So things take time.
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.
That is a weird stat, I would assume it "fell" because all the insane amounts of free compute that was going around died down around those years, and some companies finally made AI policies. My employer (in one of those fancy Fortune lists) still is not using it in a meaningful way for development.
It’s not hard to find fluctuating surveys, but it’s the wrong question to be asking.
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.
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 SEC would beg to differ with your first para. I imagine that "protect" involves "adjudication":
"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."
I'll admit in an earlier life I got suckered by Chamath's fast-talking, hyper-confident bluster. Dude was just a conman who got lucky. They say it's better to be lucky than smart.
The SEC did adjudicate the SPAC era. If you think there was a crime that the SEC should pursue then lets discuss this but SPACs are a perfectly valid way to go public.
Everyone gets audited financials before the De-SPAC process occurs.
No they aren’t. Using a shell company that has nothing to do with your business so that you can float garbage stock without the full IPO process is bogus.
All the SPACS, the NKLA (truck rolling down a hill) stuff, GME/AMC, Zack Morris crypto pumpers, SAVA (fake Alzheimer's drug) and investigations of shorters was a total disgrace. Truly the golden age of fraud. I don't think we'll see a market that insane for another 20 years.
If the government shouldn’t press its thumb on the scale at the start (fair to argue!) then it shouldn’t press its thumb on the scale when they demand a bailout.
Primarily, other rich people - waiting keenly in the wings for the Buy Signal.
Because the nature of this whole thing is a cycle. The worst of it is that the consequences echo downwards until they hit social strata that can't handle any loss (because they have little). That's where the social cost really beds in, in the thousands and millions of ruined lives of ordinary people that are the collateral damage each time there's a failed round of the RL Investment Board Game funded by the world's wealthiest 10%.
Why not? The government is allowed to destroy private enterprise as much as the government is allowed to destroy society. Just because you personally disagree with it doesn't mean society doesn't have the right to destroy companies they find to be damaging to society.
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).
No, they have not. They have incentives to do so, but they are only obligated to follow the law and in the US, even that obligation is relaxed by a lot.
Bailouts have been a wonderful tool in the 21st century. During 2008 crisis, there was an unbelievable high ROI to them, both in the $ value of investments in the banks and in the global economic catastrophe it prevented.
It's not as simple as just looking at the ROI of an individual bailout; what if the crisis itself only happened at the level it did because of the expectation of the bailout in the first place?
> 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.
The housing bailout also arguably worked extraordinarily well at preventing a much greater, prolonged loss / depression of value in real-estate. The largest bailout in world history went to US homeowners via the Fed de facto purchasing garbage mortgages to pull them off the market.
But isn’t that kicking the can down the road? Isn’t that the reason housing is incredibly over valued and wealth inequality is a huge problem here and around the world?
Yes, but "kicking the can down the road" has been the defining policy in most of the West for the last 60 years as it's what benefits the oligarchs. See, that metaphorical "can" here being kicked doesn't exist for them. It used to, but they rightly believed it wouldn't happen in their lifetime, and now it's locked in thanks to private drone armies if even the shadow of a "can" appears to be forming.
The people who "lost everything" were people who bought houses they couldn't afford by lying about their incomes. Counting on the bubble growing forever.
You are ignoring the many documented cases of predatory mortgage lenders encouraging elderly and otherwise infirm people to switch to the “lower rate mortgages”.
Acting like the only people who had these loan obligations were actively doing something wrong is a total myth.
Meanwhile Wells Fargo, who gave loans to dead people to meet quotas, was made whole and then fined a few token dollars.
The people who "didn't lose everything" were people who were lying about securities being AAA worthy while in reality being filled with subprime junk. Counting on getting bailed out and facing no consequences.
If we universally euthanize people once they reach a certain age and fail to pass certain capability tests, we'd also very likely see an ROI as the costs of maintaining the elderly and their increasing consumption could be put to more productive uses in the economy.
Still... something strikes me as just... well... morally wrong about that.
Ah, so we're redefining "pension" as a kind of "bailout" here? After all, if you think about it, isn't every healthcare intervention also a form of "bailout"? People's health should be allowed to succeed or fail without the moral hazard of bailouts!
(sarcasm marker, because there really are people who think like that)
They also caused it by encouraging banks to make loans to people who couldn't afford to pay them back, to "promote home ownership".
The actual problem wasn't really regulatory, it was that they made a change to a complex system and nobody noticed what the implications were until it was already a Problem.
What happened was, mortgages were always considered safe loans, because if the borrower defaults then you repossess the house and sell it to recover the principal. Meanwhile banks would only make loans to people with good credit, because even if you can repossess the house, doesn't mean you want the trouble. So if you looked at the past, holding mortgages was a good investment.
Then they started allowing the banks to sell the mortgages to investors. Which is fine if the investors are doing their homework and buying loans that are going to be paid back, but mortgages were considered safe, so they were basically not paying attention. There was a thing where they had some bundles of mortgages rated as AAA when they shouldn't have been, but that was more of a scapegoat for the institutional investors who should have known better to blame somebody else after things started going south.
The actual cause was this: Once the banks started selling mortgages to investors, they no longer cared if the borrower would pay it back, because now that's the investor's problem -- and the investors weren't paying attention. Meanwhile as soon as the bank sells the mortgage, they have the principal back from the investor and can go loan it out again. And while this is happening the government is encouraging it because look at all of these new home owners. So now you have the banks giving mortgages to everybody regardless of creditworthiness, and that's what really caused it.
Because doing that creates a housing bubble, as all the people who can't actually afford a house can now bid up the prices by taking out a loan they can't afford. And the housing bubble in turn invalidates the assumption that if the borrower defaults you can recover the principal by repossessing the house, because now when the bubble pops, people end up underwater on their mortgages. The value of the house crashes and is now less than the loan principal. So when those borrowers start to default, the investors holding those mortgages and the insurers insuring them were lined up to get smashed. Oops.
I think you moved pretty quick past the part of why mortgages weren't safe.
Mortgages were given to people with no documentation allowed people to lie about their income and get loans they couldn't afford. That was alright because they had low introductory rates/payments they could afford. The market was getting more expensive and you could refinance to a better loan when you're LTV was more favorable before the balloon payments hit.
Those were the loans that were rated AAA.
Once the market growth slowed just enough to not allow the refinancing before the balloon payments, the defaults started, at first slowly then all at once.
Strong contender for most short-sighted comment I've read on HN. Second-order effects? Never heard of them! And if I did, they're all pure speculation anyway! And if they're not, they're much smaller than what was prevented! There was _no_ other option!
This is basically correct, and should not be downvoted.
People forget why the retail banks were bailed out: because they're an essential service that is used on a daily basis! Imagine if you woke up one day and heard that Amazon was bankrupt, and therefore all AWS storage was going to be offline for 30+ days, and if a buyer could not be found the hard disks would be sold off at auction with no opportunity to retrieve your data.
And, yes, from this we can infer which tech companies are "too big to fail" and therefore would be bailed out if ever at risk of imminent bankruptcy and shutdown: the cloud companies. AWS, Google, Microsoft, and probably Cloudflare as well.
The Intel "bailout" was more like the General Motors one, good old fashioned manufacturing protectionism.
Americans should also note that almost all other countries with bank failures had comparable bailouts. A few exceptions: Iceland (failure of Kaupthing forced the UK government to bail out some local authorities who were banking with them!), and Cyprus ("bail in" with loss of money in high value accounts, basically because the EU deemed the country to be too deep in dodgy foreign money to be worth saving).
It's mainly the FTC, but I think the SEC does enforce some rules on pyramid schemes etc. even if the operators of them aren't being misleading. Certain business models are ruled out.
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.
You could but why stop there? I argue that enforcing the standards for compliance and transparency is one of the greatest levers. After that it’s on the market. You will never stop an individual from buying fools gold and in some sense it’s healthy for some to fail no matter how silly the investment was.
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.
Good thing you're not in charge with your communist attitude. If they kept controlling shares hidden from public, you'd had a point. Nobody is asking you to buy shares of companies with controlling shares.
> 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?
Adjudicating over public good is literally the point of the government. What are you talking about...? Do you think we live in a libertarian free market paradise?
The article suggests exactly that requiring to delay IPO until 2 consequent quarters of detailed financial audits will be available from Anthropic. Without that there is simply not enough information for an investor to make a rational choice.
It's a highly speculative investment in a company that, based on current trends, relies heavily on technology which doesn't exist yet and experts in the field aren't sure what it will be used for. It lost 42 billion dollars last year.
I'm not even going to say it is a bad investment, it might be a once in a lifetime opportunity. But if the current public information isn't enough to dissuade a buyer then that investor is sophisticated enough that they can wait 2 more quarters after the IPO before buying.
It kills me that I know their whole business is built on a false premise, but those who have never maintained software can't see it.
All that's really happening is that they're borrowing from a source of debt that's completely off the books: software quality debt.
That is the steel wall they are set up slam into at 100mph. Just because tech debt isn't on the books doesn't mean it isn't a force that can halt growth.
It'd be like if we passed 1 million new laws to regulate commerce. That's good for business right? The only thing better would be ten million new regulations
> The article suggests exactly that requiring to delay IPO until 2 consequent quarters of detailed financial audits will be available from Anthropic. Without that there is simply not enough information for an investor to make a rational choice.
I plan to invest a (relatively small) amount of money in Anthropic's IPO. The amount of money I plan to invest is so small (around 1–2% of my total portfolio), the downside is minimal – if it crashes to zero, I've lost 1–2%. I don't see how this is "irrational" for me to do–if I want to do it, the risk is something I'm aware of and can handle. I don't think two quarters of financial results is going to change anything, because I'm doing it based on vibes, not based on stock fundamental analysis.
> I don't see how this is "irrational" for me to do
And..
> because I'm doing it based on vibes, not based on stock fundamental analysis.
So it seems that you do agree that you're not acting rationally, but you're okay with that as its contained.
The thing is: if enough people do what you're planning to do, the market is basically broken. Early investors will be getting back healthy returns, based on making ludicrous investments in a very risky business that still hasn't been validated at all. Basically a Ponzi scheme.
With more data, analysts might be able to raise more severe warning flags, that might deter people like you from investing.
Or Anthropic might actually take over the entire economy, and holding its stock might be the only worthwhile economic activity left for us, mere humans. :-)
You aren't the target for arguing the SEC should delay the IPO, it's for investment vehicles like pension funds that take down the whole economy if they crash.
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.
I thought they were going to say, we have a duty to protect the public from the self-mutating swarms of artificial life about to explode onto our networks (as per the Astra/Qwen article on front page), but no, they meant the dubious VC finances!
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[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 58.6 ms ] threadFrankly, 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
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.
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.
So even if one believes in AI the rational choice is to invest into hardware that AI companies needs (GPUs, gas turbines, batteries, solar panels)
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 wealthiest Americans have never owned so much of the stock market, with the top 10% now holding a record 93% of US equities, according to Federal Reserve data.
the bottom 50% of Americans owned just 1% of all stocks and mutual fund shares
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.
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.
Oh buddy, if you don't like that, then I have some bad news for you then when it comes to executive agencies' authority to unilaterally develop and implement rules. Not just the SEC, but every executive agency just has to have consistent rules. Legislation is super vague, often intentionally.
Even before Chevron was overruled, you basically had to just not be "arbitrary and capricious" and follow procedures like public comment periods, even though you don't have to listen. Now that Chevron has been overruled, the unitary executive theory has taken hold in the Supreme Court, so there's probably a majority that might even say a unitary executive agency doesn't even need to follow the arbitrary and capricious standard.
Not saying this is good, just what has long been standing precedent.
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.
The market is not functioning well for the average person, so we petition the state to do something about it.
Live by laissez faire, die by laissez faire
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.
Greg Brockman, OpenAI's president, gave Trump $25M.
Dario Amodei gave Trump a hard time.
Do the math...
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].
[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/regulation_s-x
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.
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.)
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...
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.
Don't they? To match expected growth over the years? There's only so much money in software.
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."
Everyone gets audited financials before the De-SPAC process occurs.
That's VERY GOOD.
Right? Right.
Because the nature of this whole thing is a cycle. The worst of it is that the consequences echo downwards until they hit social strata that can't handle any loss (because they have little). That's where the social cost really beds in, in the thousands and millions of ruined lives of ordinary people that are the collateral damage each time there's a failed round of the RL Investment Board Game funded by the world's wealthiest 10%.
Now bailing out somebody who over-invested in Nvidia but also holds the world's retirement savings... now that's something I can believe.
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!
Literally nobody said this.
> 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...
Acting like the only people who had these loan obligations were actively doing something wrong is a total myth.
Meanwhile Wells Fargo, who gave loans to dead people to meet quotas, was made whole and then fined a few token dollars.
Still... something strikes me as just... well... morally wrong about that.
(sarcasm marker, because there really are people who think like that)
Didnt the US govt cause the crisis by refusing to regulate derivatives because their donors didnt want it to be regulated.
The actual problem wasn't really regulatory, it was that they made a change to a complex system and nobody noticed what the implications were until it was already a Problem.
What happened was, mortgages were always considered safe loans, because if the borrower defaults then you repossess the house and sell it to recover the principal. Meanwhile banks would only make loans to people with good credit, because even if you can repossess the house, doesn't mean you want the trouble. So if you looked at the past, holding mortgages was a good investment.
Then they started allowing the banks to sell the mortgages to investors. Which is fine if the investors are doing their homework and buying loans that are going to be paid back, but mortgages were considered safe, so they were basically not paying attention. There was a thing where they had some bundles of mortgages rated as AAA when they shouldn't have been, but that was more of a scapegoat for the institutional investors who should have known better to blame somebody else after things started going south.
The actual cause was this: Once the banks started selling mortgages to investors, they no longer cared if the borrower would pay it back, because now that's the investor's problem -- and the investors weren't paying attention. Meanwhile as soon as the bank sells the mortgage, they have the principal back from the investor and can go loan it out again. And while this is happening the government is encouraging it because look at all of these new home owners. So now you have the banks giving mortgages to everybody regardless of creditworthiness, and that's what really caused it.
Because doing that creates a housing bubble, as all the people who can't actually afford a house can now bid up the prices by taking out a loan they can't afford. And the housing bubble in turn invalidates the assumption that if the borrower defaults you can recover the principal by repossessing the house, because now when the bubble pops, people end up underwater on their mortgages. The value of the house crashes and is now less than the loan principal. So when those borrowers start to default, the investors holding those mortgages and the insurers insuring them were lined up to get smashed. Oops.
Mortgages were given to people with no documentation allowed people to lie about their income and get loans they couldn't afford. That was alright because they had low introductory rates/payments they could afford. The market was getting more expensive and you could refinance to a better loan when you're LTV was more favorable before the balloon payments hit.
Those were the loans that were rated AAA.
Once the market growth slowed just enough to not allow the refinancing before the balloon payments, the defaults started, at first slowly then all at once.
People forget why the retail banks were bailed out: because they're an essential service that is used on a daily basis! Imagine if you woke up one day and heard that Amazon was bankrupt, and therefore all AWS storage was going to be offline for 30+ days, and if a buyer could not be found the hard disks would be sold off at auction with no opportunity to retrieve your data.
(a much smaller version of that happened: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49285418 )
And, yes, from this we can infer which tech companies are "too big to fail" and therefore would be bailed out if ever at risk of imminent bankruptcy and shutdown: the cloud companies. AWS, Google, Microsoft, and probably Cloudflare as well.
The Intel "bailout" was more like the General Motors one, good old fashioned manufacturing protectionism.
Americans should also note that almost all other countries with bank failures had comparable bailouts. A few exceptions: Iceland (failure of Kaupthing forced the UK government to bail out some local authorities who were banking with them!), and Cyprus ("bail in" with loss of money in high value accounts, basically because the EU deemed the country to be too deep in dodgy foreign money to be worth saving).
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.
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?
I'm not even going to say it is a bad investment, it might be a once in a lifetime opportunity. But if the current public information isn't enough to dissuade a buyer then that investor is sophisticated enough that they can wait 2 more quarters after the IPO before buying.
All that's really happening is that they're borrowing from a source of debt that's completely off the books: software quality debt.
That is the steel wall they are set up slam into at 100mph. Just because tech debt isn't on the books doesn't mean it isn't a force that can halt growth.
It'd be like if we passed 1 million new laws to regulate commerce. That's good for business right? The only thing better would be ten million new regulations
Can you be more specific? Are we talking about technical debt that Anthropic itself took on, or that its customers took on?
For sure it's not a lifetime opportunity for a regular guy. I expect it to have a similar dynamics as Uber after IPO.
I plan to invest a (relatively small) amount of money in Anthropic's IPO. The amount of money I plan to invest is so small (around 1–2% of my total portfolio), the downside is minimal – if it crashes to zero, I've lost 1–2%. I don't see how this is "irrational" for me to do–if I want to do it, the risk is something I'm aware of and can handle. I don't think two quarters of financial results is going to change anything, because I'm doing it based on vibes, not based on stock fundamental analysis.
And..
> because I'm doing it based on vibes, not based on stock fundamental analysis.
So it seems that you do agree that you're not acting rationally, but you're okay with that as its contained.
The thing is: if enough people do what you're planning to do, the market is basically broken. Early investors will be getting back healthy returns, based on making ludicrous investments in a very risky business that still hasn't been validated at all. Basically a Ponzi scheme.
With more data, analysts might be able to raise more severe warning flags, that might deter people like you from investing.
Or Anthropic might actually take over the entire economy, and holding its stock might be the only worthwhile economic activity left for us, mere humans. :-)
First time?
No, I don’t agree I’m “not acting rationally”. How do you define “rationality”?
Then the investor can invest in something else if it doesn't have enough information about Anthropic to invest in it.
—
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.
Oh but sure it’s for a good cause
Genuinely surprised they didn’t ask us to “think of the children”
It's a "Junk stock". They should let it crash and burn.