Anthropic Is Preparing for IPO and We Should Be Worried

These companies are not publicly traded yet so they are not in these indices. Funds are fighting to keep them out so they’re not required to buy stocks they think will tank.

It's time for Google/Elon/Softbank/sovereign wealth funds, etc to cash out.

For you, it's time to tilt to bond and value.

Public markets are a different animal all together.

There are some concerned there won’t be enough willing to invest. That is a real risk given people smell a bubble about to pop.

The other ironic risk is if the float is too small it creates an artificially high valuation by letting a thin, momentum-driven market price 100% of the cap table, which then collapses when lockups expire, supply floods in, and the real market discovers the stock is worth far less than the marginal buyers said it was.

For example there’s talk that in that scenario SpaceX could end up with a 5T valuation… for a company that did only $18.5B in revenue last year. Thats beyond irrational even under the most aggressive growth scenarios.

The primary mechanism behind that is liquidity; Passively held assets decrease liquidity, and with there being a lot of passively held assets, liquidity isn't so great.

There are some warning signs that demand for AI companies, especially OpenAI, may not be so high as expected. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-01/openai-de... (Though OpenAI asserts that the demand is low because the seller isn't trusted)

On the other hand, it also seems like OpenAI and Anthropic are seeking to have a relatively "small" IPO by not selling too many shares. The market may absorb a few tens of billions. The big questio is how long it'll take for more of those companies to hit the market afterwards; They're burning through their money awfully quickly, and the earlier investors will want out as well.

What are you basing this on?

The whole point of an index fund is I'm not paying someone to try to guess what stocks are going to under/over perform the S&P.

And when they are required to buy is not really a mystery either. they have very little discretion.

Now the risk is a massive stockmarket wide collapse. Over a third of the S&P 500 is AI heavy tech stocks. With how reliant Nvidia is on AI compute sales, there's a real risk that at least 7% of the market disappears instantly, and everything else will hurt massively as well.

You can't hedge against that. There's a good chance this will have contagion solely from the sheer size of a dotcom style crash in our current stock market. Pension funds would start selling off their unrelated assets to cover their losses.

Nevermind any secondary concerns; How balls deep private equity and private credit are in AI. How useless the current US administration is at both economic and monetary policy.

That held before SpaceX merged X, xAI and friends. Those are bleeding way more money than Starlink can recover.

that said, it definitely helped

The question is if the MoE advances and compression (TurboQuant) makes common computers fast enough to run local models that are "Good Enough".

As for subscription/token costs, even with increases they’re not even remotely covering costs. If people actually paid what it cost for these companies to even break even, nobody would be using these tools. They simply aren’t that consistently useful despite all the grand claims. They can be useful and in some areas they are very useful, but nobody is going to spend thousands of dollars a month to have something rewrite their emails regularly. And it’s not like these companies are trying to target one industry. They want to target everyone.