Anthropic plans to go public as soon as October. The AI company that makes Claude wants to beat OpenAI to the market. Investment bankers are scheduling meetings with investors. This is called preparing for an IPO.
Nobody asked whether the public markets need another AI company valued at numbers that require scientific notation. The bankers lined up anyway. They get paid either way. Anthropic gets to ring a bell and pretend the stock price means something about the quality of their chatbot.
OpenAI remains private. Anthropic sees an opening. The race is on to see which company can disappoint retail traders first. Winning means extracting maximum capital from people who think buying shares in a large language model is the same thing as understanding how one works.
The meetings happen soon. Bankers will present slides showing revenue projections that assume every human on earth subscribes to Claude Premium twice. Institutional investors will nod. They will ask about moats and margins. Nobody will ask why a company that loses money on every API call deserves a valuation higher than Belgium's GDP.
Retail gets access later. Always later. By the time shares hit your brokerage account the smart money already sold to the slightly-less-smart money. You get to buy from the slightly-less-smart money at prices that assume Anthropic cures death by Q3.
October approaches. The roadshow begins. Someone will compare this to the Netscape IPO. That person will feel very smart for remembering 1995. Everyone will ignore that most companies from that era now exist only as case studies in business school.
Anthropic beats OpenAI to market and retail traders get a new ticker symbol to lose money on while telling themselves they invested in the future.
Photo by Brecht Corbeel on Unsplash
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