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Comments (136)

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  marsten
  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.
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  titanomachy
  > 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.
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  cowlevel
  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.
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  stingraycharles
  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.
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  stockresearcher
  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?
• wqtz
  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.
• andai
  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!
• kazinator
  > Dig a little deeper, however, and a far bleaker picture emergesIf an online tech journalist can figure out this sort of thing, with the information available to him, maybe so can members of the investing public?And the ones who don't are just going to be victims of their own greed anyway.
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  alistairSH
  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.
• MattDamonSpace
  What a bad idea “let’s further empower a fickle federal gov to dictate the lives of citizens”Oh but sure it’s for a good causeGenuinely surprised they didn’t ask us to “think of the children”
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  millspore
  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?
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  wmf
  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.
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  jawiggins
  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.
• Arubis
  Signed with love, Sam.—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.
• singron
  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.
• anon
  undefined
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  davidguetta
  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) ?
• Danox
  The insiders at the top won’t allow it…
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  JumpCrisscross
  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.
• zzzeek
  I'm sorry, evacuate? In our moment of triumph?
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  zer00eyz
  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.
• slipperybeluga
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• CurbStomper5
  [dead]
• demo4567
  The SEC should SEC to protect the public.