frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Made with ♥ by @iamnishanth

Open Source @Github

fp.

Open in hackernews

Anthropic reportedly preparing for $300B IPO

https://vechron.com/2025/12/anthropic-hires-wilson-sonsini-ipo-2026-openai-race/
69•GeorgeWoff25•6h ago

Comments

rvz•6h ago
> In a statement, an Anthropic spokesperson said: “We have not made any decisions about when, or even whether, to go public.”

They are going public.

JosephjackJR•5h ago
Anthropic is burning roughly $1B a quarter right now, has no clear path to profitability, and is still riding on the same “we’re the safe AI” narrative that’s starting to wear thin as everyone else catches up on safety tooling. Their revenue run-rate is reportedly in the low single-digit billions at best, which would put them at a price-to-sales multiple of 50–100× if they actually hit that valuation. For context, OpenAI at its last round was “only” ~80B on similar (or higher) revenue expectations. The moat feels increasingly shaky too. Claude is great, but the gap to GPT-4o, Gemini 2, and the open-source frontier is shrinking fast, and they’re still heavily dependent on AWS credits rather than owning their own infra like Google or Meta. At $300B they’d be priced for perfection in a world where perfection doesn’t exist yet. I’d be shocked if it actually prices anywhere near that. Curious what others think.
pu_pe•5h ago
The optimistic view is that Anthropic is one of about four labs in the world capable of generating truly state-of-the-art models. Also, Claude Code is arguably the best tool in its category at the moment. They have the developer market locked in.

The problem as I see it is that neither of those things are significant moats. Both OpenAI and Google have far better branding and a much larger user base, and Google also has far lower costs due to TPUs. Claude Code is neat but in the long run will definitely be replicated.

blitzar•2h ago
> Claude Code is arguably the best tool in its category at the moment. They have the developer market locked in.

I am old enough (> 1 year old) to remember when Cursor had won the developer market from the previous winner copilot.

Google or Apple should have locked down Anthropic.

pragmatic•2h ago
If they had, they would have killed it.

Google should be stomping everyone else but it's ad addiction in search will hold it back. Innovators dilemma...

bionhoward•2h ago
Cursor still wins over Claude Code because Cursor has privacy mode
milowata•2h ago
The missing piece here is Anthropic is not playing the same game. Consumer branding and larger user base are concerns for OpenAI vs Google. Personal chatbot/companion/ search isn’t their focus.

Anthropic is going for the enterprise and for developers. They have scooped up more of the enterprise API market than either Google or OpenAI, and almost half the developer market. Those big, long contracts and integration into developer workflows can end up as pretty strong moats.

SOLAR_FIELDS•1h ago
most of the secret sauce of Claude Code is visible to the world anyway, in the form of the minified JavaScript bundle they send. If you’re ever wondering about its inner workings you can simply ask it to deminify itself
SOLAR_FIELDS•1h ago
Most of the secret sauce of Claude Code is visible to the world anyway, in the form of the minified JavaScript bundle they send. If you’re ever wondering about its inner workings you can simply ask it to deminify itself
gtirloni•37m ago
> They have the developer market locked in

Developers will jump ship to a better tool at a blink of an eye. I wouldn't call it locked in at all. In fact, people do use Claude Code and Codex simultaneously in some cases.

LatteLazy•3h ago
1. Sounds like exactly when early investors and insiders would want to cash in and when retail investors who “have heard of the company and like the product” will buy without a lot of financial analysis.

2. A 300bn IPO can mean actually raising n 300bn by selling 100% of the company. But it could also mean seeing 1% for 3bn right? Which seems like a trivial amount for the market to absorb no?

blitzar•2h ago
> A 300bn IPO ... raising 3bn

Would be so massively oversubscribed that it would become a $600bn company by the end of the day (which is a good tactic for future fund raising too).

I suspect if/when Anthropic does its next raise VCs will be buyers still not sellers.

trjordan•1h ago
> the gap to GPT-4o, Gemini 2 ... is shrinking fast

Are you ... aware that OpenAI and Google have launched more recent models?

anthonypasq•38m ago
almost every single AI doomer i listen to hasnt updated any of their priors in the last 2 years. these people are completely unaware of what is actually happening at the frontier or how much progress has been made.
esafak•27m ago
That jumped out at me too. Like a time-traveling comment or something!
blovescoffee•19m ago
Like "someone" who's knowledge cutoff is from a while back...
ctoth•17m ago
This is what happens when someone copies and pastes their old comment, note the other tells.
jascha_eng•36m ago
> reportedly in the low single-digit billions at best

They are expected to hit 9 billion by end of year. Meaning the valuation multiple is only 30x. Which is still steep but at that growth rate not totally unreasonable.

https://techcrunch.com/2025/11/04/anthropic-expects-b2b-dema...

whp_wessel•22m ago
is this comment created by AI? acc created in last 24 hours, lots of long ai-speak
surgical_fire•39m ago
Well, they have to. Every grift needs bagholders.

If they get to be a memestock, they might even keep the grift going for a good while. See Tesla as a good example of this.

zerosizedweasle•5h ago
Okay, let’s see you guys get passed the inference costs disclosure. According to WSJ it is enough to kill the frontier shop business model. It’s one of the biggest things blocking OpenAI

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/big-techs-soaring-profits-have-a...

politelemon•3h ago
Do you mean as part of going public they need to make public how much they spend on inference versus how much they make?
blackjack_•40m ago
Yes to IPO you have to submit an S-1 form which requires the last 3 years of your full financials and much more. You can’t just IPO without disclosing how your business works and whether it makes or loses money and how much.
spacecadet•3h ago
AGI will become IPO and everyone will forget and move on.
HarHarVeryFunny•1h ago
It's interesting that Amazon don't appear interested in acquiring Anthropic, which would have seemed like somewhat of a natural fit given that they are already partnered, Anthropic have apparently optimized (or at least adapted) for Trainium, and Amazon don't have their own frontier model.

It seems that Amazon are playing this much like Microsoft - seeing themselves are more of a cloud provider, happy to serve anyone's models, and perhaps only putting a moderate effort into building their own models (which they'll be happy to serve to those who want that capability/price point).

I don't see the pure "AI" plays like OpenAI and Anthropic able to survive as independent companies when they are competing against the likes of Google, and with Microsoft and Amazon happy to serve whatever future model comes along.

hyperbovine•1h ago
LOL of course they don't want to own Anthropic, else they themselves would be responsible for coming up with the $10s of billions in Monopoly money that Anthropic has committed to pay AMZN for compute in the next few years. Better to take an impressive looking stake and leave some other idiot holding the buck.
michaelbuckbee•52m ago
Amazon also uses Claude under the hood for their "Rufus" shopping search assistant which is all over amazon.com.

It's kind of funny, you can ask Rufus for stuff like "write a hello world in python for me" and then it will do it and also recommend some python books.

hbosch•17m ago
Are you sure? While Amazon doesn't own a "true" frontier model they have their own foundation model called Nova.

I assume if Amazon was using Claude's latest models to power it's AI tools, such as Alexa+ or Rufus, they would be much better than they currently are. I assume if their consumer facing AI is using Claude at all it would be a Sonnet or Haiku model from 1+ versions back simply due to cost.

runningRicky•25m ago
why exit now and become a stuffed AI driven animal when you can keep running this ship yourself, doing your dream job and getting all the woos and panties?
kordlessagain•15m ago
After watching The Thinking Game documentary, maybe Amazon has little appetite for "research" companies that don't actually solve real world problems, like Deepseek did.
ekropotin•9m ago
Maybe Anthropic simply don’t want to be acquired
nbardy•5m ago
Why are you assuming Anthropic is for sale? They have a clear path to profitability, booming growth, and a massive and mission driven founding team.

They could make more money keeping control of the company and have control.

Havoc•1h ago
Retail investors yoloing into AI at peak bubble vibes sounds about right
bombcar•1h ago
This is the real note - if the company was truly valuable, they wouldn't IPO, they'd get slurped up by someone big.

Modern IPOs are mainly dumping on retail and index investors.

torginus•26m ago
Just how much of the market do retail investors control? I thought they were a drop in the bucket.

Also, is there a way to know how much of the total volume of shares is being traded now? If I kept hyping my company (successfully), and drove the share price from $10 to $1000, thanks to retail hype, I could 100x the value of my company lets say from $100m to $10B, while the amount of money actually changing hands would be miniscule in comparison.

theptip•5m ago
Retail is a big deal these days. Used to be sub 10%, now it’s in the 30-40% of daily volume range IIUC.

You can easily look up the numbers you are asking for, the TLDR is that the volume in most stocks is high enough that you can’t manipulate it much. If it’s even 2x overpriced then there’s 100m on the table for whoever spots this and shorts, ie enough money that plenty of smart people will be spending effort on modeling and valuation studies.

thoughtfulchris•1h ago
It could be smart for them to get in now with so much talk of a bubble or potential stock market correction.
hansmayer•6m ago
...this -> those bags wont hold themselves now, will they ?
Ekaros•6m ago
"Be first, be smarter, or cheat" well. Being first might really be the best game theory move if the collapse will start from you.
catigula•45m ago
This seems contrary to their stated goal to prioritize AI safety.

It is against the law to prioritize AI safety if you run a public company. You must prioritize profits for your shareholders.

unstatusthequo•38m ago
Do you think they currently exist to prioritize AI safety? That shit won’t pay the bills, will it? Then they don’t exist. Goals are nice, OKRs yay, but at the end of the day, we all know the dollar drives everything.
simgt•22m ago
No that's not what they think, that's why they used sarcasm.
sidrag22•2m ago
"We expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers."

-google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin

then came the dot com bubble.

baggachipz•43m ago
That S1 is gonna make for a fun read. It'll make Adam Neumann blush.
conroydave•35m ago
that wework s1 was gold
esafak•29m ago
Elevating the world's consciousness! https://www.wework.com/newsroom/wecompany
dnw•41m ago
I was thinking this is going to happen because last night I got an email about them fixing how they collect sales taxes. Having been part of a couple of IPO/acquisitions, I thought to myself: "Nobody cares about sales taxes until they need to IPO or sell."
ChrisArchitect•32m ago
Source: https://giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/actions/redeem/3ffefa...
muffa•7m ago
I love claude, but looking at google it seems like it will just be a matter of time before Google/Gemini will be a better product. Just looking at how much Google have improved their AI game the last couple months. I'm putting my money on google, I assume the reason they are doing an IPO right now is to be able to cash in on the investment before google surpasses them.

It's a hot take, I know :D

Congressional lawmakers 47% pts better at picking stocks

https://www.nber.org/papers/w34524
385•mhb•2h ago•235 comments

Why are my headphones buzzing whenever I run my game?

https://alexene.dev/2025/12/03/Why-do-my-headphones-buzz-when-i-run-my-game.html
26•pacificat0r•36m ago•15 comments

You Can't Fool the Optimizer

https://xania.org/202512/03-more-adding-integers
141•HeliumHydride•3h ago•72 comments

GSWT: Gaussian Splatting Wang Tiles

https://yunfan.zone/gswt_webpage/
23•klaussilveira•1h ago•5 comments

Anthropic acquires Bun

https://bun.com/blog/bun-joins-anthropic
2025•ryanvogel•22h ago•977 comments

A Look at Rust from 2012

https://purplesyringa.moe/blog/a-look-at-rust-from-2012/
90•todsacerdoti•1w ago•12 comments

Helldivers 2 devs slash install size from 154GB to 23GB

https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/pc-gaming/helldivers-2-install-size-slashed-from-154gb-t...
185•doener•2h ago•117 comments

How to Synthesize a House Loop

https://loopmaster.xyz/tutorials/how-to-synthesize-a-house-loop
9•stagas•5d ago•0 comments

Anthropic reportedly preparing for $300B IPO

https://vechron.com/2025/12/anthropic-hires-wilson-sonsini-ipo-2026-openai-race/
71•GeorgeWoff25•6h ago•51 comments

Mapping Every Dollar of America's $5T Healthcare System

https://healthisotherpeople.substack.com/p/an-abominable-creature
49•brandonb•1h ago•26 comments

IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off

https://www.businessinsider.com/ibm-ceo-big-tech-ai-capex-data-center-spending-2025-12
722•nabla9•21h ago•815 comments

Zig quits GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined the service

https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/02/zig_quits_github_microsoft_ai_obsession/
654•Brajeshwar•8h ago•356 comments

Microsoft lowers AI software sales quota

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-lowers-ai-software-sales-141531121.html
24•ramoz•55m ago•6 comments

Interview with RollerCoaster Tycoon's Creator, Chris Sawyer (2024)

https://medium.com/atari-club/interview-with-rollercoaster-tycoons-creator-chris-sawyer-684a0efb0f13
207•areoform•11h ago•36 comments

Super fast aggregations in PostgreSQL 19

https://www.cybertec-postgresql.com/en/super-fast-aggregations-in-postgresql-19/
160•jnord•1w ago•15 comments

AI agents break rules under everyday pressure

https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-agents-safety
232•pseudolus•6d ago•113 comments

Researchers Find Microbe Capable of Producing Oxygen from Martian Soil

https://scienceclock.com/microbe-that-could-turn-martian-dust-into-oxygen/
72•ashishgupta2209•9h ago•28 comments

The "Mad Men" in 4K on HBO Max Debacle

http://fxrant.blogspot.com/2025/12/the-mad-men-in-4k-on-hbo-max-debacle.html
240•tosh•4h ago•102 comments

Paged Out

https://pagedout.institute
508•varjag•19h ago•53 comments

The Writing Is on the Wall for Handwriting Recognition

https://newsletter.dancohen.org/archive/the-writing-is-on-the-wall-for-handwriting-recognition/
110•speckx•1w ago•58 comments

OpenAI declares 'code red' as Google catches up in AI race

https://www.theverge.com/news/836212/openai-code-red-chatgpt
754•goplayoutside•1d ago•830 comments

Mission Critical Advanced Scheduling (ALAP/ASAP) System

https://github.com/rodmena-limited/scriptplan
21•rodmena•5d ago•3 comments

Optimizations in C++ compilers: a practical journey

https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3372264
12•fanf2•4d ago•0 comments

I designed and printed a custom nose guard to help my dog with DLE

https://snoutcover.com/billie-story
570•ragswag•3d ago•68 comments

India scraps order to pre-install state-run cyber safety app on smartphones

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clydg2re4d1o
109•wolpoli•5h ago•20 comments

Quad9 DOH HTTP/1.1 Retirement, December 15, 2025

https://quad9.net/news/blog/doh-http-1-1-retirement/
83•pickledoyster•9h ago•29 comments

Trying Out C++26 Executors

https://mropert.github.io/2025/11/21/trying_out_stdexec/
42•ingve•5d ago•24 comments

Learning music with Strudel

https://terryds.notion.site/Learning-Music-with-Strudel-2ac98431b24180deb890cc7de667ea92
535•terryds•1w ago•127 comments

Qwen3-VL can scan two-hour videos and pinpoint nearly every detail

https://the-decoder.com/qwen3-vl-can-scan-two-hour-videos-and-pinpoint-nearly-every-detail/
245•thm•3d ago•75 comments

Are we repeating the telecoms crash with AI datacenters?

https://martinalderson.com/posts/are-we-really-repeating-the-telecoms-crash-with-ai-datacenters/
11•davedx•4h ago•0 comments