Yet another Hacker News

Anthropic IPO

119 points josephljohnston 1 hour ago 121 comments

_def 49 minutes ago | parent

Let the enshittification begin

mococa 48 minutes ago | parent

It already enshitificated from the very begin

grendelt 47 minutes ago | parent

Absolutely.

So what's the best primer we can share for getting started with local llms?

colesantiago 46 minutes ago | parent

> Let the enshittification begin

But is there a solution to this though?

How does one stop 'enshittification' of everything exactly?

I'm not talking just about Anthropic.

palata 43 minutes ago | parent

One thing Doctorow suggests is to remove anti-circumvention, thus allowing adversarial interoperability.

tremarley 41 minutes ago | parent

Competition Enforcement

Strong privacy laws

Tech unionization

Mandated data portability.

colesantiago 34 minutes ago | parent

Has these successfully combatted against enshittification entirely?

Which places has this been successful?

Avicebron 22 minutes ago | parent

What are you talking about, these haven't even been tried because the corporate lobbyists know they work..

mapontosevenths 26 minutes ago | parent

Competition is important, but the way you fix that is by fixing the terms of copyright and patents.

Intellectual property, at it's simplest, is a government mandated monopoly granted to allow for progress in the sciences and "useful arts" (think trades really, not arts and crafts). All monopolies are bad, but it was only to be granted for a limited time so it was fine.

Corrupt politicians ruined the entire trade off though, and now it seems that copyrights and patents last for 100 years plus the life of the universe. During which time no one can really compete fairly.

If we want rapid progress in science, we want short patents. Instead we opted for long patents and a higher stock price. R&D budgets have been shrinking ever since.

ZiiS 41 minutes ago | parent

What is super odd about this is no-one expects Anthropic to prioritizes shareholders.

jfckenfishf 39 minutes ago | parent

Opus 5.5 has been terrible for me for the last week - so seems like they got the memo.

Luckily switching is super easy so I'm now back to codex (and hopefully carbon soon)

tietjens 48 minutes ago | parent

"public benefit corporation" lol yeah yeah

p-e-w 43 minutes ago | parent

This is a legal designation that means very little in concrete terms, and in particular, courts have held that “the public” does NOT have standing to sue a public benefit corporation to enforce that it’s actually working for the public benefit.

Yajirobe 48 minutes ago | parent

Will this, together with Jensen’s affairs, finally pop the AI bubble?

BadBadJellyBean 46 minutes ago | parent

We can only hope.

srgb_vs_cmyk 44 minutes ago | parent

Only if issued stock is met with very low demand. Otherwise, we need to wait for OpenAI IPO or Oracle/CoreWeave going under.

marginalia_nu 31 minutes ago | parent

Plausibly part of the chain of events, unlikely to be a cause in itself. Nothing pops because of an underperforming IPO.

Though Anthropic's IPO flopping might affect the valuation of OpenAI, which further inhibits their ability to raise additional funds (which they're already been struggling with). Given the incestuous financing in AI any major actor in the AI space defaulting could bring a lot of companies with it.

As a side note, regardless of outcome, Anthropic IPO:ing is the first step in the inexorable march toward profit maximization and enshittification. You all better be ready with your verification cans.

hubraumhugo 46 minutes ago | parent

With SpaceX, now Anthropic, and soon OpenAI, we're seeing 3 of the largest IPOs ever. Will existing institutional investors trim other positions to allocate a lot of capital for these mega listings or is this not a concern?

Doches 42 minutes ago | parent

I wouldn't worry too much about OpenAI; they seen to gave deferred their IPO until 'sometime in 2027'. At this point they're basically at the mercy of Anthropic, since if the Anthropic IPO goes poorly or gets pulled then it's going to look to investors (and everyone else, frankly) like OAI will be dead on arrival, too.

Fun times ahead, for sure.

p-e-w 46 minutes ago | parent

$23 billion quarterly net loss.

Hundreds of billions in future liabilities.

IPO valuation above $1 trillion.

The lunatics are running the asylum.

A_D_E_P_T 43 minutes ago | parent

I unironically believe that bitcoin -- and, downstream, the memestock -- have everything to do with this.

Old-school fundamentals are laughed at or handwaved away. FOMO rules the day. "If Anthropic is the first to AGI, it'll take over every industry and go to the moon!"

p-e-w 41 minutes ago | parent

Sure, and if it isn’t, investors just flushed a freight train loaded with dollar bills down the world’s largest toilet.

mxschumacher 36 minutes ago | parent

the question is: who will rise in the ashes of the bust, in a world of abundant compute availability and an upgraded power system?

Avicebron 11 minutes ago | parent

Do we have an upgraded power system? I'm all for reforming our electrical infrastructure, but what I'm hearing is that we've got creaking infrastructure and the "supplement" is huge generators towed outside the datacenter...

mxschumacher 9 minutes ago | parent

gigantic order books for gas turbines and power grid infra, unless projects get cancelled, massive additional capacity is coming, yes.

dotancohen 35 minutes ago | parent

Nobody is buying these companies because they believe that the company is valuable. They are buying these stocks because they believe that the stock may be more valuable tomorrow than it is today. Whatever the company behind the stock does or does not do, really doesn't matter. AI glitters like gold today.

Yet to be seen if it tarnishes.

datakan 13 minutes ago | parent

>"If Anthropic is the first to AGI, it'll take over every industry and go to the moon!"

Meanwhile the hyper advanced software company's shitty electron app still flickers so bad on a high refresh monitor that it should require an epilepsy warning. I'll never understand the love for Anthropic, they legitimately have the worst software I have used outside of Microsoft.

HeavyStorm 42 minutes ago | parent

What the hell is 15% adjusted margin? Lots of mathmagic there I guess...

Kwpolska 35 minutes ago | parent

The real number with standard accounting rules is a loss of $567 million (-3% operating margin). But they're adding in "Stock-based compensation expense" (~$1B) and "Non-cash charitable contributions" (~$2B), and they end up with a profit of $2.5 billion.

yorwba 17 minutes ago | parent

If you want to know whether the business is hemorrhaging money and will soon be bankrupt, excluding funny money they printed at no cost to themselves is perfectly sensible. Of course for the IPO investors, who're being asked to buy that funny money for real cash, it's a bit concerning if they give away so much of it to other people for less.

juliie 37 minutes ago | parent

To be fair, that loss includes over $20b from instruments like convertible notes. They're not equity, so the increase in their value has to be reported as a loss. But in the context of this IPO, they will behave like equity, and just turn into stock. That's not money anthropic will pay, it will just dilute investors during IPO.

Reporting an increase in the value of the company as a loss is weird, but they have to do it. this is a case where adjusted earnings give a better idea of how the business is going.

lofaszvanitt 37 minutes ago | parent

It's going to skyrocket. :DDD

the_duke 28 minutes ago | parent

As the page says, almost 22bn of that is a book loss due to share price increase.

So their loss is actually small compared to revenue.

epolanski 21 minutes ago | parent

And buying too!

small_model 45 minutes ago | parent

I would wait for 2-3 quarters before investing, it will drop and there will likely be lock-ins to contend with. if growth slows then price could tumble fast.

xnx 42 minutes ago | parent

So I should short it?

jstanley 40 minutes ago | parent

To profit from shorting it you need to not just be right that it is going to go down, but be able to tolerate the volatility in the interim.

rob74 16 minutes ago | parent

"Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent". That, or the markets may turn out to be right after all...

jstanley 3 minutes ago | parent

I always liked "you can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent".

alembic_fumes 15 minutes ago | parent

So I should straddle it?

edit: To clarify, this is a light-hearted continuation about how essentially any claim about the stock market is enactable in some form. And so even the much of generally well-intentioned advise is in fact a claim that the person should be putting their money on, if they truly believe it. I think only claims like "Nobody knows what's going to happen, it's effectively gambling => stay out of the market" come close to being fully self-consistent, but e.g. advising to not buy because the price comes down, or to not short because of volatility both fail this. Markets are funny.

jstanley 6 minutes ago | parent

I didn't claim that it was going to go down though.

My only claim was that to profit from shorting it you need to not just be right that it is going to go down, but be able to tolerate the volatility in the interim.

That's a claim about the stock market, how do you enact it?

Note it is not a claim that volatility is definitely going to be high.

epolanski 33 minutes ago | parent

As the late Charlie Munger said about Tesla: I wouldn't own it, I wouldn't short it.

dozerly 32 minutes ago | parent

If you have to ask, then you shouldn’t short it.

xnx 22 minutes ago | parent

Right. I was trying to emphasize that no one knows what the stock price will do.

ftchd 16 minutes ago | parent

That's why there's a stock market

DharmaPolice 30 minutes ago | parent

If you view that as an investment then no. If you view it as a minor flutter then maybe. You might believe that Team X will win the next game (maybe at a 60% chance) but unless you're a degenerate gambler you wouldn't bet heavily on that outcome.

walthamstow 45 minutes ago | parent

deleted

Throwaway123129 43 minutes ago | parent

It seems to be geo-located. I get German retail offerings.

losvedir 42 minutes ago | parent

The URL says `/us`. And it calls it a "roadshow", which is the term when the company and the supporting bank goes around to investors to pitch their offering.

Kwpolska 42 minutes ago | parent

The submitted URL is https://ipo.anthropic.com/us/ . I was redirected to /eu/ ("Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, and Sweden").

fblp 34 minutes ago | parent

I was redirected to https://ipo.anthropic.com/au/ for the Australian offering

yu3zhou4 45 minutes ago | parent

Apparently not every country can participate in this IPO. As of now, if you open the Revolut Anthropic IPO page from Poland, you get:

> Linked page(s) related to Anthropic IPO can only be viewed by persons located in UK, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, and Sweden.

jstanley 40 minutes ago | parent

The UK page is effectively empty and just links to https://app.retailbook.com/offers/anthropic-ipo

xnorswap 27 minutes ago | parent

And you then have to agree to not share anything in it with anyone outside the UK, including:

> I will not transmit or otherwise send any of the information to which this gateway gives access to any person outside the United Kingdom.

It's extremely hard with modern browsers to ensure that doesn't happen!

dotancohen 40 minutes ago | parent

Poles apart.

joennlae 44 minutes ago | parent

„The IPO process begins with a roadshow starting on November 10th (EST). Subject to regulatory clearance, the final IPO share price is expected to be set on November 18th (EST), and shares are expected to begin publicly trading on November 19th (EST).“

zhivota 33 minutes ago | parent

So if share price is only set one day before trading, I guess you just have that day to decide to buy if you can get allocation from your broker? I'd like to try it but I've never bought an IPO before.

lofaszvanitt 30 minutes ago | parent

You don't need a broker. Use Saxobank or similar.

kgwgk 27 minutes ago | parent

"You don't need a broker. Use some other broker."

ftchd 17 minutes ago | parent

It's a "neobroker", get on with the times!

taude 27 minutes ago | parent

You commit to your broker before, if you're big enough of a player. They'll mostly have allocated to their biggest clients and such.

Pretty hard to get in on a hot IPO, though, as the shares will go to their favorite clients (those with the most money).

kshacker 22 minutes ago | parent

I got lucky in the Reddit ipo. I had decent karma so I got invited for their special insider track. But I had to create a new account via a link shared by Reddit. Got what I asked for.

But otherwise yes it goes as described above.

kshacker 25 minutes ago | parent

I have tried a couple of IPOs

You indicate your interest. Also start funding the account. So you fund 7000 for 100 shares at 70. Then they announce the price is 75. You must change the order to fit the funds or have extra money. Of course you can opt out or change the quantity anyways. But I think in both the cases I actually went ahead (Reddit and figma), I had to reconfirm the quantity. You can't be away from the network.

origini 21 minutes ago | parent

I just 'bought' some through ing-diba, you can set a limit.

sipsi 43 minutes ago | parent

worst day ever

sipsi 43 minutes ago | parent

maybe a leather jacket next time

brainless 41 minutes ago | parent

There is a lot of value from LLMs but it is something that I can switch easily. Yes, some frontier models are much better but users can still chose to use cheaper models for most of the work. In fact most applications, through which people will interact with LLMs anyway, will not need frontier models unless they offer "chat with AI". Anything that solves specific problems (even multiple problems) does not need frontier LLMs.

Anthropic and OpenAI will have to become more of the end user application stack. Files, calendars, emails, photos, and much more have to pass through them for them to keep making money. Else they cannot make money like the way they have been in this early era of LLMs.

fooqux 38 minutes ago | parent

It feels like people are still trying to bet on the horse that will achieve gAI.

mark_undoio 25 minutes ago | parent

I'm fascinated by exactly how an investment in the company that first reaches AGI (or whatever we decide to call it) might pay off... It feels like the stocks would absolutely be worth owning in the immediate term because they'd be hot property at the point where people realise it's happening.

The thing that I'm less clear on is, if and when they achieve some kind of recursive improvement exponential growth thingy, isn't that going to heavily disrupt the entire economy / stock market? In that environment, would Anthropic's stocks really be a good bet, given they have to operate within the economy?

piva00 7 minutes ago | parent

> The thing that I'm less clear on is, if and when they achieve some kind of recursive improvement exponential growth thingy, isn't that going to heavily disrupt the entire economy / stock market? In that environment, would Anthropic's stocks really be a good bet, given they have to operate within the economy?

That's a long-term problem to be dealt with later, greed dictates to pursue the former as long as the music is playing and everyone is dancing. Similar to 2007-2008 when it was clear that things were breaking but the incentives were to play the game for as long as possible before it imploded.

mark_undoio 4 minutes ago | parent

It's clearer to me why this works for generic investors than for the AI companies themselves - unless their plan is just for key employees to cash out and live on a private moon just before Consequences arrive.

mxschumacher 38 minutes ago | parent

a big move into end-user software would mean that they have to compete heavily with their own largest customers. The economics of offering SaaS are also under meaningful pressure and don't warrant anywhere near the valuation that is being suggested

abirch 29 minutes ago | parent

End-user software is going to be under a lot of pressure. If you're Microsoft, Apple, or Google: you can easily copy products or integrate ideas into their platform. I see companies like Adobe, Salesforce, and Oracle having to downsize significantly to stay profitable. Having said that, my in-laws still pay for an AOL email so I don't think their cashflow is going to zero soon.

mxschumacher 19 minutes ago | parent

Adobe seems to be in a tough spot, because so much of the lock-in is client side, I think Salesforce is fairly well protected, it's just so impossibly difficult to remove once a company has fully adopted it. Similar to the staying power of the ERPs of Oracle and SAP.

numlock86 8 minutes ago | parent

It's the same really. There have always been alternatives that can work with Adobe's various file formats. Even more aren't going to change much, at least for their enterprise key customers. This is not only the case for Adobe, but many others as well, e.g. MS office is still a thing these days, and so are things like 3Ds Max or Maya, albeit having many compatible cheaper or even free alternatives. It's not so much about features, pricing or even stability. It's about customer support. Do I want to ask an LLM and test my luck or write a GitHub issue and cross my fingers that someone will read it within the next weeks? No, I will pick up my phone or write a mail and get a response within hours if not minutes.

grahamlee 15 minutes ago | parent

now imagine that said customer/competitors have been uploading/generating their source code, problem reports, marketing collateral, and other IP _to the LLM company_ for the last few years.

arbll 32 minutes ago | parent

This is the same argument we have heard many times with SaaS that would presumably get replaced by open source equivalents. In practice it does not happen because there is a lot of value in having someone else deal with a problem.

whilenot-dev 6 minutes ago | parent

That "someone else" is just shifting from a single open source maintainer to an LLM.

kshri24 32 minutes ago | parent

True. We will end up getting more Google alternatives. Nothing beyond that for now at least.

elorant 21 minutes ago | parent

Easily in the context of the corporate world is to pay for something, that something gets installed and then just works, and if it doesn’t work there’s always someone you can call 24/7 to come and fix it. I don’t see how this is possible with open models.

jansan 19 minutes ago | parent

Isn't that exactly how Linux companies are making money?

dgellow 16 minutes ago | parent

You pay a service provider, who manages the open models… there is absolutely nothing special about it. The hardware can be something you own. Or you rent. Or you just pay the service provider to access the open model apis. Lots of options here, it’s not different from pretty much any other software service in the corporate world

mxschumacher 16 minutes ago | parent

the answer is to use a gateway that all the prompts go through. There are many proprietary and open source solutions for this. You get the benefit of making it trivial to switch between proprietary providers in case you are unhappy with the performance or squeezed on price. The AI Gateways put cap on LLM providers' margin upside.

Additionally, the gateway allows for caching, additional security checks, centralized monitoring. I think most corporations have a multi-provider setup anyway.

steve1977 11 minutes ago | parent

Good luck in calling Anthropic support...

tzal3x 41 minutes ago | parent

Here comes the new qwen model announcement.

maeln 41 minutes ago | parent

A lot of ink has been spilled over the projected IPO of the big AI player. But part of me wonder if, in some ways like what happen with SpaceX, it will end up being a nothingburger. A first few crazy days on the market, then whatever, the company is just public now. And with how shares and voting power are attributed, it seems like, just like for spacex, it won't risk changing the power structure of the company.

steveBK123 37 minutes ago | parent

Quoting a tweet I saw yesterday but..

Biopharma CEO "This presentation contains forward-looking statements, as a result of risks and uncertainties..."

AI/Tech CEO "We will cure all diseases in less than 10 years"

Like look I get it, this is truly impressive tech, but can we at least be a little more sober?

mxschumacher 11 minutes ago | parent

it's surprising that the SEC and other regulatory agencies don't intervene on these statements. Not to mention that "cure cancer" is more of a slogan in the sense that cancer comes in countless families and varieties, I don't doubt that progress is possible but to say that "all cancers will be cured in the near future" seems outrageously aggressive / misleading

Jgrubb 37 minutes ago | parent

What an interesting flood of negative comments with nothing to say. This company has completely changed my career.

If AI went away tomorrow I would find a new line of work because artisanally handcrafting code is the most boring use of my time in the entire world.

rtp4me 21 minutes ago | parent

Welcome to HN - the land of the miserable

origini 13 minutes ago | parent

I like writing code, but seeing my ideas visualized after an hour is more fun than writing code.

And even if AI is disappearing tomorrow and not progressing any further, i see already myself living on a farm with cheap energy (pre invest into solar and batterie) and having my small AI datacenter in basement and running multiply fable level agents 24/7 for different things.

Genie is out of the bottle.

anentropic 37 minutes ago | parent

Enshittification coming soon

thibsrn 36 minutes ago | parent

There is a heavy amount of circular investments in the industry, among competitors. There is a private placement that is made in parallel with the public offering, through $26B of a special stock, according to the S1. They all have a lot to gain from a successful Anthropic public issue. The problem is it blurs the signal, we don't how much is overvaluation that contributes to a bubble.

I don't think there has often been such an intertwined industry before. Usually cartels are made through discreet partnerships at the operational level, this is an interconnection in the background at the financial one.

mxschumacher 14 minutes ago | parent

yep, for a comprehensive writeup and analysis of the circular finance topic, have a look at https://hntrbrk.com/investigations/nvidia

Sarkie 33 minutes ago | parent

"We have only bits and pieces of information, but what we know for certain is that at some point in the early twenty-first century, all of mankind was united in celebration. We marveled at our own magnificence as we gave birth to AI."

luqtas 30 minutes ago | parent

Dario will re-invest the profit to solve conflict mineral issues all over the world! /j

nehal3m 24 minutes ago | parent

The Second Renaissance was great. I’ve heard a lot of scifi computers speak but the deadpan delivery of humanity’s end in detail always kind of haunted me.

rob74 10 minutes ago | parent

Ah yes, The Matrix. It kinda shows that that phrase was written in the "end-of-history" 1990s, before 9/11, Putin, Trump and China really becoming a global player. Mankind is definitely further away from being "united in celebration" than it was then...

VulpineQuanta 31 minutes ago | parent

Ohh boo hoo rich entitled programmers hate the fact that the company makes your lives hard. Sorry I would feel sorry for you but I just can't reach.

After having that ambition thwarted for over 26 years and working like a slave counting other people's money {a career I hate every day} your collective despair gives my schadenfreude a delicious unending orgasmic thrill. You need literally no idea.

Just remember: no dreams never work out and work by definition is something you hate every day until you die.

ChrisRR 8 minutes ago | parent

Who are you talking to?

fblp 31 minutes ago | parent

The economics of this are absurd, and Anthropic hasn't been without their controversy; but I use Claude everyday, and they've made tremendous impact on society. I wish them the best for their IPO.

Metacelsus 30 minutes ago | parent

All I can see is that the Petri dish on their letter shows uneven colony distribution, someone needs to work on their plating technique!

esskay 27 minutes ago | parent

Presumably this'll be like the spacex one - high price, instant drop and a load of amateur investors wondering why they just lost a ton of money.

999900000999 22 minutes ago | parent

I’m very skeptical.

Deepseek and other Chinese models are close enough for most typical use cases.

This could seriously wreck our entire economy, so much of the stock market is propped up by AI hype.

Anyway, expect a massive government bailout for Anthropic and Open AI when the Chinese models prove to be more cost efficient.

Might not be next year, or even this decade, but it’s coming.

PS: A fear mongering campaign is already underway, Deepseek is going to give you communist code completion!

origini 15 minutes ago | parent

Frontier is frontier and Open Models from China are not.

Then in a corporate environment, were most tokens will be spend, you have security concerns, you also might want to go with one company over the other due to partnerships etc.

If USA is blocking chinese companies/models (which they already partially did), big companies will just not bother and use US AMerican models.

Also running it yourself is often not relevant. You don't want to know how much money my company spends on software products which could easily be replicated internally.

But running models yourself might be something you don't have expertise with, you need GPU ready DC, hardware, a new/diffferent team, quality assurances etc.

And Chinese models are known to leverage frontiermodels for post-training results.

Don't get me wrong, I don't want to say chinese models can't disrupt the market massivly absolut possible, but its not given just because they are cheaper.

EcommerceFlow 17 minutes ago | parent

Got into the gpt3 beta June 2021 and haven’t looked back, yet it’s incredibly sad we had no avenue to invest in these companies until now.

Why doesn’t a private company stock market exist?

vincnetas 14 minutes ago | parent

It exist, but not for poor peaople.

arionmiles 6 minutes ago | parent

It's called the Secondary Market

TrackerFF 5 minutes ago | parent

Because we - the plebs - are here to provide liquidity for the risk-takers. Hence whey they have to IPO.

But for what it is worth, for every successful AI company like Anthropic, OpenAI, etc. - there are probably tenfold more that are valued in the low billions, and will be the first ones to wash away / become worthless if/when the bubble pops.

And lastly, private sales do exist.

mynti 14 minutes ago | parent

"Our employees' use of Claude has grown more than 250times between January and September of 2026.Together, these explain why our revenue per employee has grown more than 4.5x."

Ouch. So practically all of that Claude use is just busy work, I guess

TrackerFF 10 minutes ago | parent

The way I see it, AI is more comparable to some sort of utility. Like electricity, internet, etc. - and should be priced that way. If we ever get to "true" AGI, and the open source models also get there, what's the moat? Access to compute could be the differentiator.

abijahkaj 5 minutes ago | parent

I'm convinced that they are the best right now, but their videos are making me cringe a bit on the whole "culture" thing, feels like a star wars episode

dzonga 4 minutes ago | parent

growth flatlined between Q2 & Q3.