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Anthropic IPO predictions? Anthropic will be IPO'ing next week. At first it was supposed to be $2 trillion, then it collapsed all the way down to $1.1 trillion, but now I see $1.5 trillion and I bet it's higher.
I will probably try to get an allocation and then flip it immediately. Long term, I'm bullish on the frontier labs but with high variance. I can easily see a 90% decline or a 1000% increase within 3 years.
Bearish takes:
Horrible governance. Shareholders have no voting power and few rights. You are subordinate to the founders (51% voting rights), to the foundation, and to humanity in general. Even if Anthropic takes over the light cone, it will never pay a dividend.
Revenue growth has slowed. The H1 revenue growth was probably a one time thing due to token-maxxing. Will be much harder from now on and other models are "good enough" for most tasks.
Employees will be looking to cash out after IPO lockups expire.
Will the hyperscalers kneecap Anthropic? Quite possibly. Anthropic is openly competing with everyone. Why should Google, Amazon, or SpaceX rent them space? Good chance that Google and Amazon dump shares then stop renting. Elon in particular can pull the plug on their compute with 90 day notice.
If they are successful, they will be nationalized.
I would be shocked if China doesn't steal their weights. I wouldn't be surprised if they already have.
Bullish takes.
The big one. Recursive self-improvement leads to them dominating all industries. Somehow they get there before OpenAI/Google/SpaceX and the advantages compound.
People will ignore the horrible governance. It won't matter until it does and by then it won't matter. Look how long Snapchat was able to coast on the worst governance of all time (worst until now, lol).
This is a big deal. The corporate cultures of Musk Inc, Alphabet and Anthropic, and probably most of the other founder-controlled tech megacorps, are all such that your equity is de facto a perpetual non-voting zero-coupon preference share. Mark Cuban famously said that these should be valued in the same way as baseball cards.
I think this is an oversimplification. I imagine that if Anthropic takes over the light cone, ASI Claude might allocate 1% of its solid angle to shareholders (for them to use in not-abhorrent purposes). They might likewise allocate another percent evenly to all of humanity alive at singularity. So if you invested a hundred dollars in them you might end up with twice the real estate. This seems like a decent enough return of investment.
Of course, it also depends on ASI Claude judging that investing in Anthropic was an ethical thing to do which should be encouraged through acausal trades. If instead it finds that Anthropic was reckless in building it then it might instead reduce the allocations for anyone involved in its creation. Personally I will not be investing in them because it is unclear to me if they are net positive to my ethics.
In a world in which corporate governance really starts to look like actual governance, "a controlling interest is vested in Amodei's descendants" is not the most, uh, enlightened, form of government I'd choose to opt for. If you squint, maybe USD starts looking like shares of America, Inc (tm): we can issue bonds or mint new shares to cover debts, for example, but we don't weight votes by dollars.
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