Research Firm Calls Anthropic's IPO 'Unprecedented Test of Investor Gullibity'

dude250711

Maybe the portion of Anthropic that produces Opus/Sonnet can be spun out for us devs at a reasonable valuation? Keep all the Mythos/Projects/etc. hype/feature-creep crap in some other entity and value that at $5 tn or something if you wish.

sobiolite

New Constructs takes a similar position on all mega IPOs. Sometimes they're right, but sometimes they're wrong. For example, they insisted Uber's IPO valuation was too high due to unsustainable losses, hidden liabilities, etc. Initially they were proved right when the post-IPO stock price plummeted, but in the long term Uber has performed well, become very profitable, and now trades well above its IPO valuation. I'm expecting a similar story to play out with Anthropic: The stock price will come down significantly after the IPO, resulting in lots of headlines about the AI bubble bursting. But in the long term it'll climb up again and investors who stick around will do very well.

anon373839

I don't see how Anthropic can become profitable enough to justify its investments unless they can either stop training models ("Pace the Frontier!!1"), or magically eliminate open source competition so that their volume x margin on inference is high enough to dwarf the training costs. For the IPO, I assume they're going to try to get everyone to focus on inference - which is profitable in isolation. But I don't know how they'll distract the market from the other half of the equation.

rwmj

I posted other (different) research into the IPO yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50033644

scandox

> In an interview with CNBC in 2021, Trainer acknowledged that “crazy stuff happens” and New Constructs doesn’t always get it right. > “I can’t let that bother me,” he said at the time. “I have to stay true to what I think is right.” Monkey remains true to darts, dartboard.

cmiles8

“So, what you're telling me is that the music is about to stop and we're going to be left holding the biggest bag of odorous excrement ever assembled in the history of capitalism.” A brilliant line from the movie Margin Call (a fictional portrait of the actual events of the 2008 crisis) that appears likely to get reused in upcoming AI bubble burst movies.

wwizo

The model is engine, the harness is the car Anthropic are selling. They are a service company, selling home-grown, mass-produced, conveniently packaged intelligence at a well established price for consumer. Their API pricing might just be for value proposition and tax deduction purposes. Every tech company, tech department, startup that I know is using claude code to deliver. The boutique deepseeks, qwens, glms and kimis are nice, but ain't production ready in 98% of cases. All the pi's, opencodes, etc are nice, but much less enterprise friendly. And google just outright sucks in comparison. There's a use case for each, but not at the scale Anthropic is doing. Only real competition - OpenAI - is close, but they're burning money to stay there, which imo is unsustainable long term. Is Anthropic worth $2T? Can't say. But boy they have a good opportunity to test this, and they may not have a similar chance in the future. I think they have a fair chance at this.

liendolucas

> The New Constructs report also notes that Anthropic’s assertion that AI could pose “a catastrophic or existential risk to humanity” is another reason why investors should avoid the IPO. So, we go from an existential threat to basically unprofitable business. I can only see Amodei and Altman just as the next Holmes.

binlog

New Constructs is bearish on every tech IPO. Easy to reinforce your bias by selectively looking at instances where they were right, like WeWork, but they also predicted failed IPOs for Spotify (+219%), Uber (+60%), CrowdStrike (+3136%), Cloudflare (+2306%), Palantir (+1991%), Snowflake (+51%), DoorDash (+93%), Robinhood (+187%), ARM (+422%), Instacart (+59%), Reddit (+370%), CoreWeave (+105%), SpaceX (+20%) and lots more. So whatever your stance on Anthropic this particular analysis is safe to ignore.

zecg

You don't buy their stock to obtain money, you do it to placate the future overlords.

ChrisArchitect

Related: Anthropic IPO prospectus shows AI vision, surging costs https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49886005

skylake5

10 months back 1T made sense, today even that looks expensive and they are eyeing 2T. How much do they expect to grow from here as a 10x growth from 2T is 20T and even a few years later 20T for a company is a lot. Amazon and Google ipoed with lots of room to grow.

chrsw

I don't understand how people are so certain on how this will play out. We have people basically saying companies like Anthropic offer no value because open source models are free. Then we have others saying once frontier AI labs go RSI FOOM takeoff they'll essentially _become_ the tech industry. None of this sounds credible.

thelastgallon

The REAL reason Anthropic must IPO now: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/E80oYhrGa8c New findings reveal AI bubble worries are justified: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/xCzCyPoI-eA

calgoo

I thought this was the reason to force an investor account on every american child, so that they can be "forced" to buy into these IPOs, and left holding the worthless stock while a massive amount of wealth is transferred from the system to a select few investors.

skybrian

Shouldn’t we wait until the S-1 is officially released before jumping to conclusions? Currently the financial data we have is based on leaks.

arisAlexis

Not easy for humans to understand the power of AI transformation

the__alchemist

I will be waiting 1-2 weeks prior to opening a short position.

mattmaroon

$2 trillion is a lot of money and certainly doesn’t seem a safe bet at that price. But also, their revenue went from <$0 in 2024 to $4b in 2025 to what will likely be >15x that in 2026. Has anything ever grown that fast before? If you carry that forward even one year, and I’m not saying you certainly can, they’re outselling NVIDIA. I get it, there are risks, scalability issues, low cost competitors, etc. $2 trillion is a big number, but it’s tiny compared to all human payroll. I’m not buying it either but I dont think anyone who does failed an IQ test.

arbuge

..."a mere $150 billion" I mean, compared to the desired IPO valuation in the trillions, it certainly deserves the "mere" description, but still...