The SEC Should Block Anthropic's IPO to Protect the Public

(techpolicy.press)

192 points | by cdrnsf 3 hours ago

23 comments

  • marsten 1 hour ago
    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.

    • gerdesj 1 hour ago
      The SEC would beg to differ with your first para. I imagine that "protect" involves "adjudication":

      "Founded to help our country respond to the Great Depression, we’re the agency that protects investors from misconduct, promotes fairness & efficiency in the securities markets, and facilitates capital formation for those looking to hire, innovate, and grow."

      • kasey_junk 1 hour ago
        Note what that explicitly doesn’t say. Any decisions about good or bad investments.
      • JacobAsmuth 1 hour ago
        Unless you're accusing Anthropic of misconduct in their financial reporting obligations I fail to see the connection.
        • bix6 1 hour ago
          You mean like making up non-standard ARR calculations and not including your Q3 results in your initial S1 draft? Or you know hiding things in footnotes in the S1 so people don’t see the full math on your obligations?
          • Manuel_D 47 minutes ago
            This wasn't hidden in the footnotes of the S1. It was quite clearly explained on page 3, under "Select Defined Terms": https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/2130357/000162828026...

            > “Run-Rate Revenue” is an operating metric that refers to the estimated annualized value of our revenue-generating activity as of a measurement date, calculated as the sum of (i) our consumption-based fees during the trailing 28-day period ended on the measurement date, multiplied by 13, and (ii) our aggregate monthly subscription fees as of the measurement date, multiplied by 12. For purposes of calculating Run-Rate Revenue, consumption-based fees and subscription-based fees are derived from customer usage and active subscriptions.

          • losvedir 46 minutes ago
            It's totally normal for companies to release their own take on the numbers alongside GAAP ones.
          • jeremyjh 52 minutes ago
            They report GAAP earnings, and explain why it is not the best method to understand their current performance. Do you think it is more meaningful to investors to use their convertible notes mark-to-market accounting and worry about a loss that represents "paying their investors what their shares are worth"?

            Adjusted revenue figures are reported all the time for many different reasons, there is absolutely nothing special about this and I've not heard ANY financial analyst explain why GAAP is a better number here. You are salivating over a total nothing-burger.

            Also, if you didn't hear, their Q3 results were spectacular and were included in an amendment today.

            I'm not an Anthropic fan-boy and I won't be buying their offering but you've picked just about the two least relevant things in this offering to complain about.

            The reasons to be skeptical of this offering is what is described in the TFA: Anthropic is committed to spending 900 billion on compute over the next decade and if they can only profitably employ 80% of that it will utterly ruin them. Dario is putting all the chips on number 12. If he is right though - and inference usage explode by 1000x Anthropic has so much scarce compute locked up that they will do very, very well.

    • bix6 1 hour ago
      The SEC should adjudicate more. The entire SPAC era should never have happened.
      • chews 24 minutes ago
        Chamath thinks otherwise.
        • thevillagechief 4 minutes ago
          I'll admit in an earlier life I got suckered by Chamath's fast-talking, hyper-confident bluster. Dude was just a conman who got lucky. They say it's better to be lucky than smart.
    • Waterluvian 51 minutes ago
      If the government shouldn’t press its thumb on the scale at the start (fair to argue!) then it shouldn’t press its thumb on the scale when they demand a bailout.
      • usefulcat 14 minutes ago
        Agreed. However, “the government” is very much not a monolithic entity.
      • whimsicalism 16 minutes ago
        Agreed, so also don't bailout.
      • za_creature 7 minutes ago
        b-but but then... who owns the bag?

        do you know how expensive private jets are to operate?

    • cma 39 minutes ago
      It's mainly the FTC, but I think the SEC does enforce some rules on pyramid schemes etc. even if the operators of them aren't being misleading. Certain business models are ruled out.

      Not that I think that applies here, just that they go beyond making sure everything has accurate filing and disclosure etc. and do have some mandate to look into the business models themselves in some cases.

    • Joel_Mckay 45 minutes ago
      Agreed, some people like to gamble, and it is not in civilizations long-term interest to preserve the fiscal integrity of the irrational.

      People will learn risk-aversion vicariously, or end up living with the consequences of an inflated hubris. =3

    • darig 7 minutes ago
      [dead]
    • alexashka 53 minutes ago
      We should just give the power to people with the most money who pay politicians to give them tax cuts and to not do anything else.

      That's VERY GOOD.

      Right? Right.

      • cornell532 50 minutes ago
        Nah. What’s good is giving lots of money to the GOVERNMENT who wants to subjugate you.

        Then they’ll take your money and piss it away because A) it doesn’t belong to bureaucrats; so they’re spendthrift

        B) bureaucrats are not gonna use what they buy; so it’s shit

  • titanomachy 2 hours ago
    > 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.

    • hannasanarion 1 hour ago
      Found the paper: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5136877

      I am not qualified to make a judgement on the research quality, but it strikes me as a little weird? And also weird to cite when trying to create an "AI is stalling" narrative, because the text of the paper doesn't really support that at all.

      The claim seems to be based on a single figure that the authors present as additional context in an appendix, which shows the trends of four surveys, in which only one of the four shows a decline. The authors don't even seem to think the decline is significant enough to comment on except to say that "the plateau in late 2025 reflects declining interest and correlates with google search trends for ChatGPT and Gemini" (which they also show using a chart that does not look like a plateau or decline to me at all).

      The methodology and survey questions are included, the numbers seem to be based on a straightforward "Do you use generative AI for your job"?

      It's weirdly ChatGPT and Gemini centric, the word "Claude" only appears once, in a definition, and "Microsoft" and "Copilot" are nowhere to be seen. I don't know how much to read into that, it just strikes me as weird and noteworthy in a paper that by its own admission is detecting a trend that is the opposite of everyone else doing large scale surveys on the topic.

      • jmtulloss 1 hour ago
        If you are not looking at Claude usage then a plateau amongst Claude competitors in late 2025 makes perfect sense.
    • simonw 1 hour ago
      That sentence links to https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2026/07/28/a...

      Here's the relevant paragraph from that story:

      > Yet those numbers may have recently levelled off. In May economists at the Census Bureau reported that “ai use remained relatively steady in many sectors over the last six months.” A survey by Jon Hartley of the University of Texas at Austin and others has found that about 33% of people now use ai at work, down from a peak of 46% in mid-2025.

      Coincidentally I posted an updated chart of AI use according to the Census Bureau this morning - https://simonwillison.net/2026/Nov/2/census-bureau-super-int... - they changed their methodology in December but the numbers have been trending up in 2026.

      As for the "survey by Jon Hartley", I think that's this one: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5136877 - "Job Loss Fears in the First Years of Generative Artificial Intelligence".

      They surveyed ~24,000 people with the question "Do you use generative AI for your job?", then later asked which of the following tools they used:

      ChatGPT, Midjourney, Claude, Gemini, Github Copilot, Scribe, Embedded products, DeepSeek, Apple Intelligence, Meta AI (Llama), Adobe Firefly

      After even more digging, I think I found the raw data for their survey in the Internet Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20250910015550/https://generativ...

      Frustratingly, it looks like that only has their 2024 and 2025 data - the 2026 data is what would show that "33% of people now use ai at work" number quoted in the Economist article, but https://generativeairesearch.org/ no longer loads and the Internet Archive don't seem to have captured anything later than 2025.

      • gruez 1 hour ago
        "ai use remained relatively steady" =/= "Americans using AI at work fell significantly "
    • forbiddenvoid 1 hour ago
      I am only one data point, but I have been very intentional about significantly reducing my AI usage. Many other people in my network are doing the same where it's reasonable to do so.

      Some people are being railroaded into more AI usage by mandate of their organizations, not because they're actually getting personal value out of it.

      ETA: I still don't think the SEC should get involved in what companies should or should not be allowed to list publicly beyond certifying that the company is not materially misleading their investors.

    • Aurornis 36 minutes ago
      It’s not hard to find fluctuating surveys, but it’s the wrong question to be asking.

      The number of people using AI at work could fall to 5%, but if those 5% of people were keeping Claude busy all day and night the overall expenditure on AI could increase.

      The growing AI revenues don’t require everyone at the office to be using it. If the software engineers are each spending $10K a month on tokens, it doesn’t matter at all if Bob from HR is doing $0.50 of Copilot queries every day.

    • sjdh76 48 minutes ago
      Its too early to tell what value will be found especially in large corps, where lot of the institutional knowledge that needs to be transferred into these systems is not straight forward to extract and encode. It effects who has power in different parts of large systems. So things take time.

      Recent example is the time they took time to wrap their head around Cloud. Now look at the revenues they generate for Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Oracle etc. Early days.

    • giancarlostoro 42 minutes ago
      That is a weird stat, I would assume it "fell" because all the insane amounts of free compute that was going around died down around those years, and some companies finally made AI policies. My employer (in one of those fancy Fortune lists) still is not using it in a meaningful way for development.
    • ecommerceguy 1 hour ago
      I'm seeing in offices, usage has gone down significantly. For alot of people, it takes more time to figure out how to get ai to do something vs just doing it.
      • leptons 1 hour ago
        I'm pretty exhausted by the amount of prompting it takes to get Opus 5.5 to do some things the way I want it done. And I'm fighting against a complex system no human wrote. Claude also writes Jira tickets and voluminous comments that no human reasonably understands, so it's all become a huge clusterfuck. Nobody even runs the project locally so we can't even review the changes until they hit a dev server 30 or 40 minutes later. Been at this company for 8 years and this year has turned into a complete shitshow thanks to the CTO drinking the AI kool-aide. I'm looking for a new job.
      • antaviana 1 hour ago
        I have the impression that the gifted can leverage AI a lot more than normal people. My early views about AI were that it would democratize intelligence, but now my opinion is that it will be a huge catalyst for the gifted people, increasing social and economic differences.
        • claytongulick 1 hour ago
          From personal experience, what I've seen is the opposite. The less "gifted" attempt to lean on AI to close capability gaps, with results that are amusing at best, and disastrous at worst.
    • Bender 1 hour ago
      I think it might also be interesting to see a breakdown of how many people are using the free versions, the basic, pro and enterprise versions of which models from which AI companies and what they are using them for.
    • tbrownaw 1 hour ago
      If I'm using a tool that in turn uses AI -- like how more and more office stuff has magic autocomplete, or how Teams does automatic transcription and summaries -- am I really using AI?
    • Jedd 1 hour ago
      The link he provides is to a paywall, but bouncing over that, you can see the economist's lack of proper citation too, when they note:

      > A survey by Jon Hartley of the University of Texas at Austin and others has found that about 33% of people now use AI at work, down from a peak of 46% in mid-2025.

  • andai 4 minutes ago
    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!
  • cowlevel 2 hours ago
    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.
    • jubilanti 11 minutes ago
      The law is the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1913, among others, and it is intentionally incredibly vague when it comes to what counts as anticompetitive.
    • pixelatedindex 53 minutes ago
      The concern is that “bad apples” get into indices and then that starts to rot people’s futures. I’m not sure how that will play out (indices can kick them out, or if the company really fails the market cap will reflect that and the index can “heal”). I’m guessing Enron was part of the index at some point, but we survived that.
    • Danox 1 hour ago
      All human endeavors play favorites. We shall see if the SEC will let lightning strike two times in one year.
      • AnimalMuppet 51 minutes ago
        Even if so, human endeavors like the SEC are supposed to play favorites according to specific, well-established rules. At that point, it becomes a bit of a stretch to call it "playing favorites".

        Or, if you insist on keeping your claim, then when the SEC is playing "favorites", it's "the favorite set of rules", not favorite companies.

        • jubilanti 3 minutes ago
          > when the SEC is playing "favorites", it's "the favorite set of rules", not favorite companies.

          Oh buddy, if you don't like that, then I have some bad news for you then when it comes to executive agencies' authority to unilaterally develop and implement rules. Not just the SEC, but every executive agency just has to have consistent rules. Legislation is super vague, often intentionally.

          Even before Chevron was overruled, you basically had to just not be "arbitrary and capricious" and follow procedures like public comment periods, even though you don't have to listen. Now that Chevron has been overruled and the unitary executive theory has taken hold in the Supreme Court, so there's probably a majority that might even say a unitary executive agency doesn't even need to follow the arbitrary and capricious standard.

          Not saying this is good, just what has long been standing precedent.

  • stingraycharles 2 hours ago
    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.

    • CamperBob2 1 hour ago
      Elon Musk gave Trump $290M.

      Greg Brockman, OpenAI's president, gave Trump $25M.

      Dario Amodei gave Trump a hard time.

      Do the math...

    • applebottomjean 2 hours ago
      If companies were already profitable why would they go public?
      • stingraycharles 2 hours ago
        To let early investors exit? Most private funds like that have a horizon of 10 years, so they want to sell their investments at some point.
      • saalweachter 12 minutes ago
        It used to be the norm for companies to become profitable, then IPO, moreso for megacorps.

        If I am remembering my history correctly, the first company to go public with a multi-billion dollar valuation while being unprofitable was Netscape, which kicked off the dotcom bubble.

      • ben_w 1 hour ago
        Same reason they take private investments or loans: To grow faster than would be possible without that.
      • infinite_spin 1 hour ago
        public investment can be magnitudes larger than your profit, allowing growth that would otherwise not be possible
  • stockresearcher 2 hours ago
    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?

    • thinkingtoilet 2 hours ago
      Yes. There are too many people entire retirements on the line to hide behind the usual song and dance people do around this. What's the alternative. Let them proceed, the bubble burst, tank the market, then have the poorest and least equipped people to manage a recession just suffer? This is exactly what a government for the people could do. Or we could just keep letting rich assholes destroy everything with no consequences.
      • stockresearcher 1 hour ago
        Do you really expect to learn something that you don't already know by making Anthropic do two quarters of audited financials? What happens then? Come up with another reason for delay?
        • andriy_koval 1 hour ago
          I won't be surprised if audit finds another few 100B of hidden debt
          • stockresearcher 1 hour ago
            But would that change your opinion?
            • ajmurmann 49 minutes ago
              My opinion or the opinion of investors who trade individual stock?
            • andriy_koval 1 hour ago
              higher chance to recieve junk rating and reduced initial evaluation
              • stockresearcher 23 minutes ago
                Look, if it makes you feel better, I'm happy to state that I thought the SpaceX IPO price was too high and that it is probably still too high. But in the long run, it might turn out to be a great investment.

                I believe that the Anthropic IPO price will be too high, but also in the long run it might turn out to be a great investment.

                The most important thing I believe is that this is what I signed up for when I bought lots and lots of VTI. And that I can change to a different set of investments pretty much instantly for 9 hours a day, 5 days a week. With no tax hit because it's in my retirement account.

                • andriy_koval 19 minutes ago
                  > I signed up for when I bought lots and lots of VTI. And that I can change to a different set of investments pretty much instantly for 9 hours a day

                  I don't think that's what avg 401k holder is doing

      • nh23423fefe 2 hours ago
        The poorest least equipped people don't have money in the market. Are you suggesting the SEC is capable of stopping a recession from occuring?
      • stale2002 50 minutes ago
        > What's the alternative.

        The alternative is don't invest in them?

        Or, if you are this certain that they are going to fail, then short their stock. You could make millions.

      • katbyte 1 hour ago
        Maybe the stock market shouldn’t be people’s retirements?
      • spiderice 1 hour ago
        The "the usual song and dance people" of letting people choose what to do with their money. Sure bud.
  • wqtz 2 hours ago
    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.

  • wmf 2 hours ago
    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.
    • novia 29 minutes ago
      They already released the q3 numbers yesterday, right?
      • wmf 7 minutes ago
        Ah, you're right. I didn't notice they updated the prospectus today.
  • alistairSH 2 hours ago
    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.
    • senordevnyc 29 minutes ago
      They have been audited, it’s in the S-1.
    • JumpCrisscross 1 hour ago
      What makes you think Anthropic isn’t audited?
      • nicce 1 hour ago
        That is something obvious to add on relevant public materials.
        • senordevnyc 28 minutes ago
          Like the S-1? Guess what’s in there…
  • millspore 3 hours ago
    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?
    • phyzix5761 2 hours ago
      12 month waiting period plus 4+ quarters of profitable earnings before you qualify for inclusion.
    • JumpCrisscross 2 hours ago
      No.
    • msy 2 hours ago
      The SEC's obligation is to all market participants, not just index fund holders.
      • cgio 2 hours ago
        Arguably if you consciously choose to invest on a stock there should be no protection or obstacle other than regulated controls. For indices I see the point of extra protection. Where it gets murky is when you look at retirement funds, where you still have no control, but that should be regulation on the funds themselves rather than the stock.
    • sandworm101 2 hours ago
      These days? All rules are maybe this or maybe that depending on political winds.

      Frankly, no company should be allowed to IPO without showing steady profit. An exchange or index that promotes IPOs of unprofitable companies diminishes its reputation, and the reputation of all other stocks it indexes.

      Anthropic is free to continue selling shares privately. They can setup a website and take cc payments if the care so much.

      • packetlost 2 hours ago
        > Frankly, no company should be allowed to IPO without showing steady profit

        This is directly counter to the original point of public markets at all

  • kazinator 1 hour ago
    > Dig a little deeper, however, and a far bleaker picture emerges

    If 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.

  • jawiggins 2 hours ago
    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.
    • thevinter 2 hours ago
      A year ago Anthropic was losing billions per year. I'm sure that if it had listed and then collapsed everyone would've gone "first they run around saying how AI needs to benefit society and then they dump a cash-burning company on pension funds"
      • jawiggins 2 hours ago
        But pension funds are already invested in them through the VC funds. The only difference is (more) people would be able to invest in Anthropic without paying management fees to middlemen.
        • xvector 2 hours ago
          Most 401ks and pension funds do not invest in pre IPO companies, this is just blatant misinformation
          • JumpCrisscross 1 hour ago
            > Most 401ks and pension funds do not invest in pre IPO companies

            Pensions do, individuals don’t.

            “Less than 1% of the $14 trillion in assets in the defined contribution retirement system is invested in private markets, compared with approximately 24% for U.S. public pension funds and 17% for private pension funds as of 2023” [1].

            [1] https://bipartisanpolicy.org/article/the-role-of-private-mar...

            • senordevnyc 33 minutes ago
              “Private markets” is not the same thing as pre-IPO companies
          • drdrey 1 hour ago
            some pension funds definitely do
          • bryan_w 1 hour ago
            Who said anything about 401ks?
      • NewJazz 2 hours ago
        Better to dump it when valuation is low instead of inflated.
      • xienze 2 hours ago
        Aren't they still losing billions per year?
  • Arubis 1 hour ago
    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 2 hours ago
    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.
  • davidguetta 3 hours ago
    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) ?
    • judge2020 3 hours ago
      The S&P 500 denied early admission to SpaceX.
    • phyzix5761 2 hours ago
      There's a 12 month waiting period plus the company has to show 4+ quarters of positive net earnings before qualifying to be included.
    • gloryjulio 3 hours ago
      Spacex is not included in sp500 yet. Nasdaq is the one fast tracked spacex to dump on the retails
      • andriy_koval 3 hours ago
        Many funds use Russel indexes, which included SpaceX already
        • derektank 2 hours ago
          The Russell indices, and other indices like the CRSP total market index, might include newly public companies like SpaceX, but the relative weight of them in the index will be float-adjusted, so a company like SpaceX that has kept a lot of its shares locked up will be underrepresented in the index compared to a more established public company.
        • JumpCrisscross 2 hours ago
          Many funds use lots of indices. Very few dollars are being forced to buy these offerings.
          • andriy_koval 2 hours ago
            Russel indexes are used by very large funds, e.g. vanguard usually track russel
            • edoceo 2 hours ago
              Which Vanguard and at which weight?
              • andriy_koval 2 hours ago
                the largest 2.3T is https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/VTI/ which tracks CSRP which fasttracked SPaceX
                • derektank 2 hours ago
                  To be clear, while the CRSP fast tracked SpaceX’s admission to their total market index, that policy (which states that if a security's total market cap is larger than the breakpoint of the CRSP US Small Cap Index, it is can be added after 5 days of trading) has been in place for at least a decade. Unlike SpaceX’s admission to the Nasdaq, this did not represent a change in policy.
                  • andriy_koval 1 hour ago
                    this article says crsp changed policy too: https://www.morningstar.com/funds/spacex-ipo-how-index-funds...
                    • stockresearcher 46 minutes ago
                      (FYI, CRSP doesn't exist anymore)

                      CRSP adjusted their methodology prior to SpaceX IPO being announced. It's part of a larger discussion about what the purpose of an index is and how people invest. Vanguard is not out to screw people's retirement up (quite the opposite really). Anyone is welcome to be part of the discussion, but it's hard to get anyone to take you seriously if you only come out of the woodwork when something "bad" is about to happen.

                      • andriy_koval 38 minutes ago
                        > (FYI, CRSP doesn't exist anymore)

                        it absolutely exists, but was renamed

                        > CRSP adjusted their methodology prior to SpaceX IPO being announced.

                        important part is when SpaceX ipo plans were decided, not announced to clueless public

                • JumpCrisscross 1 hour ago
                  How many marginal dollars from that went into SpaceX?

                  The index drama was mostly a creation of influencers.

                  • andriy_koval 1 hour ago
                    so you saying you know exact number affected by index drama, and it is small? What is that?
  • Danox 1 hour ago
    The insiders at the top won’t allow it…
  • zzzeek 2 hours ago
    I'm sorry, evacuate? In our moment of triumph?
  • JumpCrisscross 2 hours ago
    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.
    • digitaltrees 2 hours ago
      Please edit the first sentence out. Keep it civil.

      As far as your claim, it's fine to say let the market sort it out, but perhaps consider that pension funds and index funds now represent a market distortion that means anthropic crashing is harder and even if it does would happen after the mandatory purchases by the index funds which is basically a transfer from the public to the insiders at anthropic

      • phyzix5761 2 hours ago
        There's a 12 month waiting period plus the company has to show 4+ quarters of positive net earnings before qualifying to be included in the S&P 500. Pension and index funds are gonna be ok.
      • JumpCrisscross 1 hour ago
        > mandatory purchases by the index funds

        How many dollars do you think are forced to purchase these companies’ shares?

      • yorwba 2 hours ago
        Maybe the SEC should instead block funds from distorting the market by making large predictable transactions, then.
    • andy_ppp 2 hours ago
      But we all know markets aren’t rational, I’m unconvinced we shouldn’t step in… if I started selling anthrax the government would try to stop me. This product might malfunction and show people how to make said anthrax which would be bad. Same with most things, everyone thinks this is a bubble. I think we should actually just put a cap on how much hardware data centres can buy per year, that would be the sensible solution tbh.
    • fzeroracer 1 hour ago
      How will 'the market' figure it out when these companies have been directly angling for the too big to fail line? The end result is that they'll get a bailout due to national security interests or something so that the economy doesn't completely shit itself and then we're on the hook for it.

      That's why people want the IPO to be blocked because we've seen what happens before.

  • zer00eyz 2 hours ago
    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.

    • fullshark 2 hours ago
      Why do you think they will delay the IPO? I bet there's enough demand to buy their stock.
    • xur17 2 hours ago
      > if I was one to bet

      You can do exactly that on Polymarket and make good money if you are right.

  • slipperybeluga 2 hours ago
    [dead]
  • CurbStomper5 1 hour ago
    [dead]
  • demo4567 2 hours ago
    The SEC should SEC to protect the public.