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Anthropic reportedly preparing for $300B IPO(vechron.com)
177 points by GeorgeWoff25 10 hours ago | 144 comments
  • HarHarVeryFunny5 hours ago

    It's interesting that Amazon don't appear interested in acquiring Anthropic, which would have seemed like somewhat of a natural fit given that they are already partnered, Anthropic have apparently optimized (or at least adapted) for Trainium, and Amazon don't have their own frontier model.

    It seems that Amazon are playing this much like Microsoft - seeing themselves are more of a cloud provider, happy to serve anyone's models, and perhaps only putting a moderate effort into building their own models (which they'll be happy to serve to those who want that capability/price point).

    I don't see the pure "AI" plays like OpenAI and Anthropic able to survive as independent companies when they are competing against the likes of Google, and with Microsoft and Amazon happy to serve whatever future model comes along.

    • hyperbovine5 hours ago |parent

      LOL of course they don't want to own Anthropic, else they themselves would be responsible for coming up with the $10s of billions in Monopoly money that Anthropic has committed to pay AMZN for compute in the next few years. Better to take an impressive looking stake and leave some other idiot holding the buck.

    • michaelbuckbee4 hours ago |parent

      Amazon also uses Claude under the hood for their "Rufus" shopping search assistant which is all over amazon.com.

      It's kind of funny, you can ask Rufus for stuff like "write a hello world in python for me" and then it will do it and also recommend some python books.

      • antiloper3 hours ago |parent

        > It's kind of funny, you can ask Rufus for stuff like "write a hello world in python for me" and then it will do it and also recommend some python books.

        Interesting, I tried it with the chatbot widget on my city government's page, and it worked as well.

        I wonder if someone has already made an openrouter-esque service that can connect claude code to this network of chat widgets. There are enough of them to spread your messages out over to cover an entire claude pro subscription easily.

        • jermaustin12 hours ago |parent

          A childhood internet friend of mine did something similar to that but for sending SMSes for free using the telco websites' built in SMS forms. He even had a website with how much he saved his users, at least until the telcos shut him down.

      • neilv2 hours ago |parent

        > It's kind of funny, you can ask Rufus for stuff like "write a hello world in python for me" and then it will do it and also recommend some python books.

        From a perspective of "how do we monetize AI chatbots", an easy thing about this usage context is that the consumer is already expecting and wanting product recommendations.

        (If you saw this behavior with ChatGPT, it wouldn't go down as well, until you were conditioned to expect it, and there were no alternatives.)

      • hbosch4 hours ago |parent

        Are you sure? While Amazon doesn't own a "true" frontier model they have their own foundation model called Nova.

        I assume if Amazon was using Claude's latest models to power it's AI tools, such as Alexa+ or Rufus, they would be much better than they currently are. I assume if their consumer facing AI is using Claude at all it would be a Sonnet or Haiku model from 1+ versions back simply due to cost.

        • somebodythere2 hours ago |parent

          Rufus is a Claude Haiku, yes.

    • kordlessagain4 hours ago |parent

      After watching The Thinking Game documentary, maybe Amazon has little appetite for "research" companies that don't actually solve real world problems, like Deepseek did.

    • epsilonic3 hours ago |parent

      I think they’re waiting for bargain bin deals once the bubble collapses.

    • Fergusonb33 minutes ago |parent

      Something something selling shovels in a gold rush.

    • bohan hour ago |parent

      They're likely just waiting out the eventual crash and waiting to buy at the resulting fire sale. Microsoft has done a very good job of investing in the space enough to see a potentially lucrative pay out while managing the risk enough to not be sunk if it doesn't pan out.

    • solumunus22 minutes ago |parent

      I too would be sitting back and watching my competitors commit insane capital to this unlikely bet.

    • ekropotin4 hours ago |parent

      Maybe Anthropic simply don’t want to be acquired

      • WJW2 hours ago |parent

        You understand that doing an IPO is quite literally selling big chunks of yourself to the highest bidder, right?

        • ceejayoz2 hours ago |parent

          Sort of. You can do what Zuck did; give your shares more votes, so you stay in control. (He owns 13% of the shares, but more than 50% of the voting power.) That's less doable with an acquisition.

    • cmiles83 hours ago |parent

      Would have made a lot of sense a few years ago, but not now.

    • apercu2 hours ago |parent

      Hence the need to cash out.

    • nbardy3 hours ago |parent

      Why are you assuming Anthropic is for sale? They have a clear path to profitability, booming growth, and a massive and mission driven founding team.

      They could make more money keeping control of the company and have control.

      • disgruntledphd23 hours ago |parent

        > They have a clear path to profitability

        I'd love to see evidence for such a thing, because it's not clear to me at all that this is the case.

        I personally think they're the best of the model providers but not sure if any foundation model companies (pure play) have a path to profitability.

        • JohnnyMarcone3 hours ago |parent

          What do you mean by pure play? Claude code alone is 1B revenue. It's not just the API they make money on.

          https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-acquires-bun-as-cla...

          • tapoxi3 hours ago |parent

            But there's no moat around these models, they're all interchangeable and leapfrogging each other at a decent pace.

            Gemini could get much better tomorrow and their entire customer base could switch without issue.

            • apercu2 hours ago |parent

              And, if your revenue is $1B but your costs are $2B it only lasts until the music stops....

          • wqaatwt2 hours ago |parent

            Which is not a lot at all compared to their cost and especially the valuation discussed here.

      • jbs7893 hours ago |parent

        They are selling, to public equity investors, because they can get a better price that way than selling to another company!

      • Keyframe3 hours ago |parent

        Why are you assuming Anthropic is for sale?

        They're preparing for IPO?

      • graemep3 hours ago |parent

        Assuming by "they" you mean current shareholders (who include Google and Amazon and VCs) if they are selling at least in part, why would at least some of them not be willing to sell their entire stakes?

        > They could make more money keeping control of the company and have control.

        It depends on how much they can sell for.

      • solumunus24 minutes ago |parent

        We’re not assuming anything, this whole post is about them doing an IPO…

      • parapatelsukh24 minutes ago |parent

        signed D. Amodei lmao

    • runningRicky4 hours ago |parent

      why exit now and become a stuffed AI driven animal when you can keep running this ship yourself, doing your dream job and getting all the woos and panties?

    • jklinger4103 hours ago |parent

      Amazon and Microsoft are protecting themselves from the bubble.

      • turnsout3 hours ago |parent

        Yes, repackaging and reselling AI is a starkly better business than creating frontier models

    • PunchyHamster3 hours ago |parent

      It is spending a lot of money to do the same thing (selling the shovels), and gaining maybe a bit bigger cut if the bubble doesn't burst too violently.

    • moralestapia3 hours ago |parent

      Lol, no one would want to buy that trash.

      Same w/ Perplexity.

  • baggachipz4 hours ago

    That S1 is gonna make for a fun read. It'll make Adam Neumann blush.

    • ddp26an hour ago |parent

      Because of unprofitability? ARR and growth are very high, and margins are either good or can soon become good.

      Is the claim that coding agents can't be profitable?

      • sc68cal31 minutes ago |parent

        > margins are either good or can soon become good.

        Their margins are negative and every increase in usage results in more cost. They have a whole leaderboard of people who pay $20 a month and then use $60,000 of compute.

        https://www.viberank.app

      • runako33 minutes ago |parent

        > margins are either good or can soon become good

        This is always the pitch for money-losing IPOs. Occasionally, it is true.

      • parapatelsukh17 minutes ago |parent

        let's see them then

    • conroydave4 hours ago |parent

      that wework s1 was gold

      • esafak4 hours ago |parent

        Elevating the world's consciousness! https://www.wework.com/newsroom/wecompany

    • BonoboIOan hour ago |parent

      SoftBank is just waiting to invest in this …

    • Lionga3 hours ago |parent

      Dario Amodei gives of strong Adam Neumann vibes. He claimed "AI will replace 90% of developers within 6 months" about a year ago...

      • efsavagean hour ago |parent

        It was "writing 90% of the code", which seems to be pretty accurate, if not conservative, for those keeping up with the latest tools.

        • IncreasePostsan hour ago |parent

          Yes, those using the tools use the tools, but I don't really see those developers absolutely outpacing the rest of developers who do it the old fashioned way still.

          • efsavage33 minutes ago |parent

            I think you're definitely right, for the moment. I've been forcing myself to use/learn the tools almost exclusively for the past 3-4 months and I was definitely not seeing any big wins early on, but improvement (of my skills and the tools) has been steady and positive, and right now I'd say I'm ahead of where I was the old-fashioned way, but on an uneven basis. Some things I'm probably still behind on, others I'm way ahead. My workflow is also evolving and my output is of higher quality (especially tests/docs). A year from now I'll be shocked if doing nearly anything without some kind of augmented tooling doesn't feel tremendously slow and/or low-quality.

            • dkdcio29 minutes ago |parent

              it’s wild that engineers need months or years to properly learn programming languages but dismiss AI tooling after one bad interaction

      • baobabKoodaa2 hours ago |parent

        And 12 months later Anthropic is listing 200 open positions for humans: https://www.anthropic.com/jobs

      • dkdcio2 hours ago |parent

        that’s not what he claimed, just to be clear. I’m too lazy to look up the full quote but not lazy enough to not comment this is A) out of context B) mis-phrased as to entirely misconstrue the already taken-out-of-context quote

        I think it was also back in March, not a year ago

        • nerevarthelame2 hours ago |parent

          https://www.businessinsider.com/anthropic-ceo-ai-90-percent-... (March 2025):

          >"I think we will be there in three to six months, where AI is writing 90% of the code. And then, in 12 months, we may be in a world where AI is writing essentially all of the code," Amodei said at a Council of Foreign Relations event on Monday.

          >Amodei said software developers would still have a role to play in the near term. This is because humans will have to feed the AI models with design features and conditions, he said.

          >"But on the other hand, I think that eventually all those little islands will get picked off by AI systems. And then, we will eventually reach the point where the AIs can do everything that humans can. And I think that will happen in every industry," Amodei said.

          I think it's a silly and poorly defined claim.

          • dkdcio34 minutes ago |parent

            you’re once again cutting the quote short — after “all of the code” he has more to say that’s very important for understanding the context and avoiding this rage-bait BS we all love to engage

            edit: sorry you mostly included it paraphrased; it does a disservice (I understand it’s largely the media’s fault) to cut that full quote short though. I’m trying to specifically address someone claiming this person said 90% of developers would be replaced in a year over a year ago, which is beyond misleading

            • parapatelsukh9 minutes ago |parent

              can you post the full quote then? He has posted what the rest of us read

  • bohan hour ago

    Honestly these IPOs are likely to kill the market. Once the necessary disclosures are out, and the worse-case math people are assuming turns out to have been way more optimistic than the actual truth, the entire market is likely crashing since the money is so spread out. So far there has been zero good news from an investment perspective out of LLM centered companies outside of what are ultimately just complex financial engineered investments.

    • nostrademonsan hour ago |parent

      If they get into the S&P 500 at a $300B market cap that puts them at #30, just behind Coca-Cola. They'll make up about half a percent of the index and then will have a ready supply of price-insensitive buyers in the form of everybody who puts their retirement fund into an index fund on autopilot.

      • chollida143 minutes ago |parent

        Well they'll hit the requirements for company size and country of domicile, but aren't yet at the other requirements, of profitability and a minimum of 12 months after an IPO so they have a chance of being added.

        As to the size of the bump they'll get there isn't a single rule of thumb but larger cap companies tend to get a smaller bump, which you'd expect. I've seen models estimate a 2-5% bump for large companies and a 4-7% bump for mid level and 6-12% for "small" under $20 Billion dollar market cap companies.

      • boh30 minutes ago |parent

        So if things go perfectly--it'll be good. Good to know.

      • lotsofpulp23 minutes ago |parent

        SP500 is a capitalization* weighted index, hence it is very price sensitive.

        Everybody who puts their retirement fund into an index fund are buying the index fund without relation to the index fund's price (aka price insensitive). But the index fund itself is buying shares based on each company's relative performance, hence the index fund is price sensitive. That is evidenced by companies falling out of the SP500 and even failing.

        *specifically float-adjusted market capitalization

        https://www.spglobal.com/spdji/en/documents/index-policies/m...

        >The goal of float adjustment is to adjust each company’s total shares outstanding for long-term, strategic shareholders, whose holdings are not considered to be available to the market.

        see also:

        https://www.spglobal.com/spdji/en/methodology/article/sp-us-...

        • nostrademons9 minutes ago |parent

          The S&P 500 is inversely price sensitive, as a capitalization-weighted index. Normally you want to buy low and sell high. An S&P500 index fund buys more of high-priced stocks and sells the low-priced ones, by definition. The highest market caps are the stocks with the highest prices (adjusted for number of shares outstanding, of course).

          For most ordinary investors, this doesn't really matter, because you put your money into your retirement fund every month and you only take it out at retirement. But if you're looking at the short term, it absolutely matters. I've heard S&P 500 indexing referred to as a momentum investment strategy: it buys stocks whose prices are going up, on the theory that they will go up more in the future. And there's an element of a self-fulfilling prophecy to that, since if everybody else is investing in the index fund, they also will be buying those same stocks, which will cause them to go up even more in the future.

          If you want something that buys shares based on each company's relative performance, you want a fundamental-weighted index. I've looked into that and I found a few revenue-weighted index funds, but couldn't find a single earnings-weighted index fund, which is what I actually want. Recommendations wanted; IMHO the S&P 500 is way overvalued on fundamentals and heavily exposed to certain fairly bubbly stocks (the Mag-7 alone make up 35% of your index fund, and one of them is my employer, and all of them employ heavily in my geographic area and are pushing up my home value), so I've been looking for a way to diversify into companies that actually have solid earnings.

  • muffa4 hours ago

    I love claude, but looking at google it seems like it will just be a matter of time before Google/Gemini will be a better product. Just looking at how much Google have improved their AI game the last couple months. I'm putting my money on google, I assume the reason they are doing an IPO right now is to be able to cash in on the investment before google surpasses them.

    It's a hot take, I know :D

    • baq3 hours ago |parent

      Opus 4.5 is good. At least in Cursor it’s much better than Gemini 3 Pro for writing a lot of code autonomously: faster and calls tools better.

      That said Gemini is still very, very good at reviews, SQL, design and smaller (relatively) edits; but today it is not at all obvious that Google is going to win it all. They’re positioned very well, but execution needs to be top notch.

    • aantixan hour ago |parent

      Have you tried Opus 4.5?

      It's an absolute workhorse.

      It is so proactive in fixing blockers - 90% of the time for me, choosing the right path forward.

  • mNovakan hour ago

    So would a $300B Anthropic get included in the SP500?

    • kevinqian hour ago |parent

      I think there are profitability requirements, right?

      • BJones1242 minutes ago |parent

        Profitability in both 3 month and 12 month spans. Also minimum 12 months of trading history after IPO.

        See page ~9 of https://www.spglobal.com/spdji/en/documents/methodologies/me...

  • dnw4 hours ago

    I was thinking this is going to happen because last night I got an email about them fixing how they collect sales taxes. Having been part of a couple of IPO/acquisitions, I thought to myself: "Nobody cares about sales taxes until they need to IPO or sell."

  • ares6232 hours ago

    I guess (hope) this means they don’t see a bailout happening soon enough

  • bonsai_spoolan hour ago

    Amodei is at the NYT Dealbook Summit today at 1:40 Eastern

  • thoughtfulchris4 hours ago

    It could be smart for them to get in now with so much talk of a bubble or potential stock market correction.

    • Ekaros3 hours ago |parent

      "Be first, be smarter, or cheat" well. Being first might really be the best game theory move if the collapse will start from you.

      • antiloper3 hours ago |parent

        But they aren't the first. Google is the first frontier model lab to go public.

    • hansmayer4 hours ago |parent

      ...this -> those bags wont hold themselves now, will they ?

  • Havoc5 hours ago

    Retail investors yoloing into AI at peak bubble vibes sounds about right

    • torginus4 hours ago |parent

      Just how much of the market do retail investors control? I thought they were a drop in the bucket.

      Also, is there a way to know how much of the total volume of shares is being traded now? If I kept hyping my company (successfully), and drove the share price from $10 to $1000, thanks to retail hype, I could 100x the value of my company lets say from $100m to $10B, while the amount of money actually changing hands would be miniscule in comparison.

      • andrew_lettuce2 hours ago |parent

        When you add in money managed on behalf of retail investors it gets big fast, thinking indexed funds, pensions etc. they are not immune, and ETFs by definition need to participate

        • wyre41 minutes ago |parent

          Is that not considered institutional? If i own a Vanguard ETF, the stock that comprises the ETF is classified as being owned by Vanguard, right?

          Genuinely asking.

        • baobabKoodaa2 hours ago |parent

          You are correct in the main thing you were trying to communicate, but I'll just correct this part:

          > ETFs by definition need to participate

          You meant to say "index funds". There are many different kinds of ETFs.

      • chollida138 minutes ago |parent

        Retail has gotten alot bigger lately( last 10 years and mostly since covid) and alot more "organized".

        Goldman puts out their retail reports weekly that show retail is 20% of trading in alot of names and higher in alot of the meme stock names.

        They used to be so tiny due to $50/trade fees, but with the advent of all the free money in the system since covid and GenZ feeling like real estate won't be their path to freedom, and option trading for retail, and zero commission trading retail has a real voice in the markets.

      • theptip3 hours ago |parent

        Retail is a big deal these days. Used to be sub 10%, now it’s in the 30-40% of daily volume range IIUC.

        You can easily look up the numbers you are asking for, the TLDR is that the volume in most stocks is high enough that you can’t manipulate it much. If it’s even 2x overpriced then there’s 100m on the table for whoever spots this and shorts, ie enough money that plenty of smart people will be spending effort on modeling and valuation studies.

        • tonyedgecombe3 hours ago |parent

          >Retail is a big deal these days. Used to be sub 10%, now it’s in the 30-40% of daily volume range IIUC.

          This isn't going to end well is it.

    • bombcar5 hours ago |parent

      This is the real note - if the company was truly valuable, they wouldn't IPO, they'd get slurped up by someone big.

      Modern IPOs are mainly dumping on retail and index investors.

      • antiloper3 hours ago |parent

        Index investors aren't exposed to IPOs, since the common indexes (SPX etc) don't include IPOs (and if you invest in a YOLO index that does, that's on you).

        Also:

        > The US led a sharp rebound, driven by a surge in IPO filings and strong post-listing returns following the Federal Reserve’s rate cut.

        https://www.ey.com/en_us/insights/ipo/trends

        • outside12342 hours ago |parent

          VTI and VT, two of the largest index funds, DO invest in unprofitable companies.

          And for the rest (SP 500 etc), these companies are going to fake profits using some sort of financial engineering to be included.

      • DarmokJalad17012 hours ago |parent

        What index fund is buying into IPOs ? The S&P 420?

      • andrew_lettuce2 hours ago |parent

        This isn't really true. IPOs provide access to much more money in a very short time frame. They also allow parties involved to make huge coin before, during and immediately after the process.

  • ChrisArchitect4 hours ago

    Source: https://giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/actions/redeem/3ffefa...

  • rvz10 hours ago

    > In a statement, an Anthropic spokesperson said: “We have not made any decisions about when, or even whether, to go public.”

    They are going public.

    • JosephjackJR9 hours ago |parent

      Anthropic is burning roughly $1B a quarter right now, has no clear path to profitability, and is still riding on the same “we’re the safe AI” narrative that’s starting to wear thin as everyone else catches up on safety tooling. Their revenue run-rate is reportedly in the low single-digit billions at best, which would put them at a price-to-sales multiple of 50–100× if they actually hit that valuation. For context, OpenAI at its last round was “only” ~80B on similar (or higher) revenue expectations. The moat feels increasingly shaky too. Claude is great, but the gap to GPT-4o, Gemini 2, and the open-source frontier is shrinking fast, and they’re still heavily dependent on AWS credits rather than owning their own infra like Google or Meta. At $300B they’d be priced for perfection in a world where perfection doesn’t exist yet. I’d be shocked if it actually prices anywhere near that. Curious what others think.

      • jascha_eng4 hours ago |parent

        > reportedly in the low single-digit billions at best

        They are expected to hit 9 billion by end of year. Meaning the valuation multiple is only 30x. Which is still steep but at that growth rate not totally unreasonable.

        https://techcrunch.com/2025/11/04/anthropic-expects-b2b-dema...

        • andrew_lettuce2 hours ago |parent

          30 for a company that doesn't pay anything and may never pay off at all is crazy in my book, so as a best case scenario it's an obvious hard pass.

      • pu_pe9 hours ago |parent

        The optimistic view is that Anthropic is one of about four labs in the world capable of generating truly state-of-the-art models. Also, Claude Code is arguably the best tool in its category at the moment. They have the developer market locked in.

        The problem as I see it is that neither of those things are significant moats. Both OpenAI and Google have far better branding and a much larger user base, and Google also has far lower costs due to TPUs. Claude Code is neat but in the long run will definitely be replicated.

        • milowata6 hours ago |parent

          The missing piece here is Anthropic is not playing the same game. Consumer branding and larger user base are concerns for OpenAI vs Google. Personal chatbot/companion/ search isn’t their focus.

          Anthropic is going for the enterprise and for developers. They have scooped up more of the enterprise API market than either Google or OpenAI, and almost half the developer market. Those big, long contracts and integration into developer workflows can end up as pretty strong moats.

        • blitzar6 hours ago |parent

          > Claude Code is arguably the best tool in its category at the moment. They have the developer market locked in.

          I am old enough (> 1 year old) to remember when Cursor had won the developer market from the previous winner copilot.

          Google or Apple should have locked down Anthropic.

          • theptip3 hours ago |parent

            > Cursor had won the developer market from the previous winner copilot

            It’s a fair point, but the counter-point is that back then these tools were ide plugins you could code up in a weekend. Ie closer to a consumer app.

            Now Claude Code is a somewhat mature enterprise platform with plenty of integrations that you’d need to chase too. And long-term enterprise sales contracts you’d need to sell into. Ie much more like an enterprise SAAS play.

            I don’t want to push this argument too far as I think their actual competitors (eg Google) could crank out the work required in 6-12 months if they decided to move in that direction, but it does protect them from some of the frothy VC-funded upstarts that simply can’t structurally compete in multi-year enterprise SAAS.

            • rvnx3 hours ago |parent

              I'm not sure what is the advantage of Cursor ? It's just a VS Code plugin that sends queries to LLMs, why is it valued so much ? It's quite basic.

              Is there some sort of unlimited plan that people take advantage of ?

              • camdenreslinkan hour ago |parent

                It works well, and had first mover advantage. It also is a fork of VSCode, not just an extension/plugin.

          • bionhoward6 hours ago |parent

            Cursor still wins over Claude Code because Cursor has privacy mode

          • pragmatic6 hours ago |parent

            If they had, they would have killed it.

            Google should be stomping everyone else but it's ad addiction in search will hold it back. Innovators dilemma...

        • gtirloni4 hours ago |parent

          > They have the developer market locked in

          Developers will jump ship to a better tool at a blink of an eye. I wouldn't call it locked in at all. In fact, people do use Claude Code and Codex simultaneously in some cases.

          • bostik34 minutes ago |parent

            Individual and startup devs yes. Enterprise devs, less so.

            The latter are locked in to whatever vendor(s) their corporate entity has subscribed to. In a perverse twist, this gives the approved[tm] vendors an incentive to add backend integrations to multiple different providers so that their actual end-users can - at least in theory - choose which models to use for their work.

        • SOLAR_FIELDS5 hours ago |parent

          Most of the secret sauce of Claude Code is visible to the world anyway, in the form of the minified JavaScript bundle they send. If you’re ever wondering about its inner workings you can simply ask it to deminify itself

        • riku_iki39 minutes ago |parent

          > The optimistic view is that Anthropic is one of about four labs in the world capable of generating truly state-of-the-art models.

          what about Chinese models?..

        • sleepybrett3 hours ago |parent

          > They have the developer market locked in.

          when has anything been 'locked in', someone comes with a better tool people will switch.

        • SOLAR_FIELDS5 hours ago |parent

          most of the secret sauce of Claude Code is visible to the world anyway, in the form of the minified JavaScript bundle they send. If you’re ever wondering about its inner workings you can simply ask it to deminify itself

      • trjordan4 hours ago |parent

        > the gap to GPT-4o, Gemini 2 ... is shrinking fast

        Are you ... aware that OpenAI and Google have launched more recent models?

        • anthonypasq4 hours ago |parent

          almost every single AI doomer i listen to hasnt updated any of their priors in the last 2 years. these people are completely unaware of what is actually happening at the frontier or how much progress has been made.

          • nubg3 hours ago |parent

            Their ignorance is your opportunity.

        • esafak4 hours ago |parent

          That jumped out at me too. Like a time-traveling comment or something!

          • blovescoffee4 hours ago |parent

            Like "someone" who's knowledge cutoff is from a while back...

          • ctoth4 hours ago |parent

            This is what happens when someone copies and pastes their old comment, note the other tells.

            • brazukadev3 hours ago |parent

              Nope, more like a LLM that doesn't know about GPT 5 and Gemini 3

              • rvnx3 hours ago |parent

                Even the punctuation signs are telling this is an LLM.

      • nbardy3 hours ago |parent

        You haven’t actually looked at their fundamentals. They’re profitable serving current models including training costs and are only losing money on future RD training, but if you project future revenue growth on future generations of models you get a clear path to profitability.

        They charge higher costs than OpenAI and have faster growing API demand. They have great margins compared to the rest of the industry on inference.

        Sure the revenue growth could stop but it hasn’t and there is no reason to think it will.

        • disgruntledphd23 hours ago |parent

          > They’re profitable serving current models including training costs

          I hear this a lot, do you have a good source (apart from their CEO saying it in an interview). I might have more faith in him but checks notes, it's late 2025 and AI is not writing all our code yet (amongst other mental things he's said).

          • TSiegean hour ago |parent

            The best I kind is this tech crunch article, which appears to be referencing an article from the information that is pay walled.

            > The Information reports that Anthropic expects to generate as much as $70 billion in revenue and $17 billion in cash flow in 2028. The growth projections are fueled by rapid adoption of Anthropic’s business products, a person with knowledge of the company’s financials said.

            > That said, the company expects its gross profit margin — which measures a company’s profitability after accounting for direct costs associated with producing goods and services — to reach 50% this year and 77% in 2028, up from negative 94% last year, per The Information.

            https://techcrunch.com/2025/11/04/anthropic-expects-b2b-dema...

          • JohnnyMarcone3 hours ago |parent

            We will all have a great source if they IPO :)

      • raldi2 hours ago |parent

        Offtopic, but how do you get the special X to show up when you type “50–100×”?

        • variagaan hour ago |parent

          On my phone keyboard (android) "×" is a long-press on "w"

      • LatteLazy7 hours ago |parent

        1. Sounds like exactly when early investors and insiders would want to cash in and when retail investors who “have heard of the company and like the product” will buy without a lot of financial analysis.

        2. A 300bn IPO can mean actually raising n 300bn by selling 100% of the company. But it could also mean seeing 1% for 3bn right? Which seems like a trivial amount for the market to absorb no?

        • blitzar6 hours ago |parent

          > A 300bn IPO ... raising 3bn

          Would be so massively oversubscribed that it would become a $600bn company by the end of the day (which is a good tactic for future fund raising too).

          I suspect if/when Anthropic does its next raise VCs will be buyers still not sellers.

      • whp_wessel4 hours ago |parent

        is this comment created by AI? acc created in last 24 hours, lots of long ai-speak

    • surgical_fire4 hours ago |parent

      Well, they have to. Every grift needs bagholders.

      If they get to be a memestock, they might even keep the grift going for a good while. See Tesla as a good example of this.

  • nextworddevan hour ago

    interesting HN is so bearish considering most of them spend more on AI daily than any other saas category

    • schmichaelan hour ago |parent

      Citation needed?

      I spend $0 on AI. My employer spends on it for me, but I have no idea how much nor how it compares to vast array of other SaaS my employer provides for me.

      While I anecdotally know of many devs who do pay out of pocket for relatively expensive LLM services, they a minority compared to folks like me happy to leach off of free or employer-provided services.

      I’m very excited to hopefully find out from public filings just how many individuals pay for Claude vs businesses.

  • yoyohello13an hour ago

    Let the enshitification of Claude commence!

  • zerosizedweasle9 hours ago

    Okay, let’s see you guys get passed the inference costs disclosure. According to WSJ it is enough to kill the frontier shop business model. It’s one of the biggest things blocking OpenAI

    https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/big-techs-soaring-profits-have-a...

    • vessenes3 hours ago |parent

      You did not parse that article properly. It regurgitates only what everyone else keeps saying: when you conflate R&D costs with operating costs, then you can say these companies are 'unprofitable'. I'd propose with a proper GAAP accounting they are profitable right now; by proper I mean that you amortize out the costs of R&D against the useful life of the models as best you can.

      I am not aware of any frontier inference disclosures that put margins at less than 60%. Inference is profitable across the industry, full stop.

      Historically R&D has been profitable for the frontier labs -- this is obscured because the emphasis on scaling the last five years has meant they just keep 10xing their R&D compute budget. But for each cycle of R&D, the results have returned more in inference margin than they cost in training compute. This is one major reason we keep seeing more spend on R&D - so far it has paid, in the form of helping a number of companies hit > $1bn in annual revenue faster than almost any companies in history have done so.

      All that said, be cautious shorting these stocks when they go public.

    • ac293 hours ago |parent

      Inference costs aren't a problem, selling inference is almost certainly profitable. The problem is that its (probably) not profitable enough to cover the training and other R&D costs.

      • disgruntledphd23 hours ago |parent

        Don't forget all the other costs of their business, like paying sales and solutions people (expensive, not going away any time soon).

    • politelemon6 hours ago |parent

      Do you mean as part of going public they need to make public how much they spend on inference versus how much they make?

      • blackjack_4 hours ago |parent

        Yes to IPO you have to submit an S-1 form which requires the last 3 years of your full financials and much more. You can’t just IPO without disclosing how your business works and whether it makes or loses money and how much.

  • spacecadet7 hours ago

    AGI will become IPO and everyone will forget and move on.

  • catigula4 hours ago

    This seems contrary to their stated goal to prioritize AI safety.

    It is against the law to prioritize AI safety if you run a public company. You must prioritize profits for your shareholders.

    • wyre30 minutes ago |parent

      Yes, they will prioritize AI safety until their board of directors says that needs to change.

    • vessenes3 hours ago |parent

      Unless you're a benefit corp, this is true for private companies as well. Quick q - which of the AI companies are benefit corps?

    • sidrag223 hours ago |parent

      "We expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers."

      -google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin

      then came the dot com bubble.

    • unstatusthequo4 hours ago |parent

      Do you think they currently exist to prioritize AI safety? That shit won’t pay the bills, will it? Then they don’t exist. Goals are nice, OKRs yay, but at the end of the day, we all know the dollar drives everything.

      • PunchyHamster3 hours ago |parent

        It's simple, they will redefine the term (just like OpenAI redefined "AGI" into "just makes a lot of money) into "doesn't leak user data" and then claim success

      • simgt4 hours ago |parent

        No that's not what they think, that's why they used sarcasm.

  • zozbot2343 hours ago

    Does this mean that Anthropic has more than reached AGI, seeing as OpenAI has officially defined "AGI" as any AI that manages to create more than a hectocorn's worth (100 unicorns, or $100B) in economic value?

    • andsoitis3 hours ago |parent

      If they have reached AGI (whatever the definition), we should be prioritizing looking for signs of misanthropy.

      • rvnx3 hours ago |parent

        https://assets1.cbsnewsstatic.com/hub/i/2024/11/15/3ea53e31-...

        Google Gemini

    • medler2 hours ago |parent

      That was $100B in profits, not valuation.

      • zozbot234an hour ago |parent

        Profits over what timeframe? Valuation is just the total sum of profit discounted for time and risk.

    • PunchyHamster3 hours ago |parent

      defined ? You mean re-defined to turn it into goal that's achievable within reasonable timeframe