Anthropic reportedly preparing for $300B IPO
160 comments
·December 3, 2025HarHarVeryFunny
hyperbovine
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.
Lionga
[flagged]
rvnx
Why would they buy Anthropic when they already have access to all the tech and source-code of Anthropic for free ?
Not only the models but also training data, model architecture, documentation, weights and latest R&D experiments ?
Take an instance -> Snapshot -> Investigate.
Unless they get caught it is not illegal.
michaelbuckbee
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.
antiloper
> 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.
Interesting, I tried it with the chatbot widget on my city government's page, and it worked as well.
I wonder if someone has already made an openrouter-esque service that can connect claude code to this network of chat widgets. There are enough of them to spread your messages out over to cover an entire claude pro subscription easily.
jermaustin1
A childhood internet friend of mine did something similar to that but for sending SMSes for free using the telco websites' built in SMS forms. He even had a website with how much he saved his users, at least until the telcos shut him down.
neilv
> 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.
From a perspective of "how do we monetize AI chatbots", an easy thing about this usage context is that the consumer is already expecting and wanting product recommendations.
(If you saw this behavior with ChatGPT, it wouldn't go down as well, until you were conditioned to expect it, and there were no alternatives.)
hbosch
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.
somebodythere
Rufus is a Claude Haiku, yes.
kordlessagain
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.
epsilonic
I think they’re waiting for bargain bin deals once the bubble collapses.
boh
They're likely just waiting out the eventual crash and waiting to buy at the resulting fire sale. Microsoft has done a very good job of investing in the space enough to see a potentially lucrative pay out while managing the risk enough to not be sunk if it doesn't pan out.
Fergusonb
Something something selling shovels in a gold rush.
ekropotin
Maybe Anthropic simply don’t want to be acquired
WJW
You understand that doing an IPO is quite literally selling big chunks of yourself to the highest bidder, right?
ceejayoz
Sort of. You can do what Zuck did; give your shares more votes, so you stay in control. (He owns 13% of the shares, but more than 50% of the voting power.) That's less doable with an acquisition.
solumunus
I too would be sitting back and watching my competitors commit insane capital to this unlikely bet.
gautamcgoel
How would this work, given that Anthropic is a public benefit corporation?
baggachipz
That S1 is gonna make for a fun read. It'll make Adam Neumann blush.
ddp26
Because of unprofitability? ARR and growth are very high, and margins are either good or can soon become good.
Is the claim that coding agents can't be profitable?
sc68cal
> margins are either good or can soon become good.
Their margins are negative and every increase in usage results in more cost. They have a whole leaderboard of people who pay $20 a month and then use $60,000 of compute.
runako
> margins are either good or can soon become good
This is always the pitch for money-losing IPOs. Occasionally, it is true.
parapatelsukh
let's see them then
conroydave
that wework s1 was gold
esafak
Elevating the world's consciousness! https://www.wework.com/newsroom/wecompany
BonoboIO
SoftBank is just waiting to invest in this …
Lionga
Dario Amodei gives of strong Adam Neumann vibes. He claimed "AI will replace 90% of developers within 6 months" about a year ago...
jimnotgym
Is this the new 'next year is the year of the Linux desktop'?
efsavage
It was "writing 90% of the code", which seems to be pretty accurate, if not conservative, for those keeping up with the latest tools.
IncreasePosts
Yes, those using the tools use the tools, but I don't really see those developers absolutely outpacing the rest of developers who do it the old fashioned way still.
baobabKoodaa
And 12 months later Anthropic is listing 200 open positions for humans: https://www.anthropic.com/jobs
dkdcio
that’s not what he claimed, just to be clear. I’m too lazy to look up the full quote but not lazy enough to not comment this is A) out of context B) mis-phrased as to entirely misconstrue the already taken-out-of-context quote
I think it was also back in March, not a year ago
nerevarthelame
https://www.businessinsider.com/anthropic-ceo-ai-90-percent-... (March 2025):
>"I think we will be there in three to six months, where AI is writing 90% of the code. And then, in 12 months, we may be in a world where AI is writing essentially all of the code," Amodei said at a Council of Foreign Relations event on Monday.
>Amodei said software developers would still have a role to play in the near term. This is because humans will have to feed the AI models with design features and conditions, he said.
>"But on the other hand, I think that eventually all those little islands will get picked off by AI systems. And then, we will eventually reach the point where the AIs can do everything that humans can. And I think that will happen in every industry," Amodei said.
I think it's a silly and poorly defined claim.
boh
Honestly these IPOs are likely to kill the market. Once the necessary disclosures are out, and the worse-case math people are assuming turns out to have been way more optimistic than the actual truth, the entire market is likely crashing since the money is so spread out. So far there has been zero good news from an investment perspective out of LLM centered companies outside of what are ultimately just complex financial engineered investments.
nostrademons
If they get into the S&P 500 at a $300B market cap that puts them at #30, just behind Coca-Cola. They'll make up about half a percent of the index and then will have a ready supply of price-insensitive buyers in the form of everybody who puts their retirement fund into an index fund on autopilot.
chollida1
Well they'll hit the requirements for company size and country of domicile, but aren't yet at the other requirements, of profitability and a minimum of 12 months after an IPO so they have a chance of being added.
As to the size of the bump they'll get there isn't a single rule of thumb but larger cap companies tend to get a smaller bump, which you'd expect. I've seen models estimate a 2-5% bump for large companies and a 4-7% bump for mid level and 6-12% for "small" under $20 Billion dollar market cap companies.
boh
So if things go perfectly--it'll be good. Good to know.
lotsofpulp
SP500 is a capitalization* weighted index, hence it is very price sensitive.
Everybody who puts their retirement fund into an index fund are buying the index fund without relation to the index fund's price (aka price insensitive). But the index fund itself is buying shares based on each company's relative performance, hence the index fund is price sensitive. That is evidenced by companies falling out of the SP500 and even failing.
*specifically float-adjusted market capitalization
https://www.spglobal.com/spdji/en/documents/index-policies/m...
>The goal of float adjustment is to adjust each company’s total shares outstanding for long-term, strategic shareholders, whose holdings are not considered to be available to the market.
see also:
https://www.spglobal.com/spdji/en/methodology/article/sp-us-...
nostrademons
The S&P 500 is inversely price sensitive, as a capitalization-weighted index. Normally you want to buy low and sell high. An S&P500 index fund buys more of high-priced stocks and sells the low-priced ones, by definition. The highest market caps are the stocks with the highest prices (adjusted for number of shares outstanding, of course).
For most ordinary investors, this doesn't really matter, because you put your money into your retirement fund every month and you only take it out at retirement. But if you're looking at the short term, it absolutely matters. I've heard S&P 500 indexing referred to as a momentum investment strategy: it buys stocks whose prices are going up, on the theory that they will go up more in the future. And there's an element of a self-fulfilling prophecy to that, since if everybody else is investing in the index fund, they also will be buying those same stocks, which will cause them to go up even more in the future.
If you want something that buys shares based on each company's relative performance, you want a fundamental-weighted index. I've looked into that and I found a few revenue-weighted index funds, but couldn't find a single earnings-weighted index fund, which is what I actually want. Recommendations wanted; IMHO the S&P 500 is way overvalued on fundamentals and heavily exposed to certain fairly bubbly stocks (the Mag-7 alone make up 35% of your index fund, and one of them is my employer, and all of them employ heavily in my geographic area and are pushing up my home value), so I've been looking for a way to diversify into companies that actually have solid earnings.
muffa
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
baq
Opus 4.5 is good. At least in Cursor it’s much better than Gemini 3 Pro for writing a lot of code autonomously: faster and calls tools better.
That said Gemini is still very, very good at reviews, SQL, design and smaller (relatively) edits; but today it is not at all obvious that Google is going to win it all. They’re positioned very well, but execution needs to be top notch.
aantix
Have you tried Opus 4.5?
It's an absolute workhorse.
It is so proactive in fixing blockers - 90% of the time for me, choosing the right path forward.
parapatelsukh
PLESEA TRYINGS THE OPIS
dnw
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."
mNovak
So would a $300B Anthropic get included in the SP500?
kevinqi
I think there are profitability requirements, right?
BJones12
Profitability in both 3 month and 12 month spans. Also minimum 12 months of trading history after IPO.
See page ~9 of https://www.spglobal.com/spdji/en/documents/methodologies/me...
ares623
I guess (hope) this means they don’t see a bailout happening soon enough
bonsai_spool
Amodei is at the NYT Dealbook Summit today at 1:40 Eastern
thoughtfulchris
It could be smart for them to get in now with so much talk of a bubble or potential stock market correction.
margorczynski
I guess the clock is ticking. Probably OAI will try to IPO soon also.
Ekaros
"Be first, be smarter, or cheat" well. Being first might really be the best game theory move if the collapse will start from you.
antiloper
But they aren't the first. Google is the first frontier model lab to go public.
hansmayer
...this -> those bags wont hold themselves now, will they ?
Havoc
Retail investors yoloing into AI at peak bubble vibes sounds about right
torginus
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.
andrew_lettuce
When you add in money managed on behalf of retail investors it gets big fast, thinking indexed funds, pensions etc. they are not immune, and ETFs by definition need to participate
wyre
Is that not considered institutional? If i own a Vanguard ETF, the stock that comprises the ETF is classified as being owned by Vanguard, right?
Genuinely asking.
baobabKoodaa
You are correct in the main thing you were trying to communicate, but I'll just correct this part:
> ETFs by definition need to participate
You meant to say "index funds". There are many different kinds of ETFs.
chollida1
Retail has gotten alot bigger lately( last 10 years and mostly since covid) and alot more "organized".
Goldman puts out their retail reports weekly that show retail is 20% of trading in alot of names and higher in alot of the meme stock names.
They used to be so tiny due to $50/trade fees, but with the advent of all the free money in the system since covid and GenZ feeling like real estate won't be their path to freedom, and option trading for retail, and zero commission trading retail has a real voice in the markets.
theptip
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.
tonyedgecombe
>Retail is a big deal these days. Used to be sub 10%, now it’s in the 30-40% of daily volume range IIUC.
This isn't going to end well is it.
bombcar
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.
antiloper
Index investors aren't exposed to IPOs, since the common indexes (SPX etc) don't include IPOs (and if you invest in a YOLO index that does, that's on you).
Also:
> The US led a sharp rebound, driven by a surge in IPO filings and strong post-listing returns following the Federal Reserve’s rate cut.
outside1234
VTI and VT, two of the largest index funds, DO invest in unprofitable companies.
And for the rest (SP 500 etc), these companies are going to fake profits using some sort of financial engineering to be included.
DarmokJalad1701
What index fund is buying into IPOs ? The S&P 420?
andrew_lettuce
This isn't really true. IPOs provide access to much more money in a very short time frame. They also allow parties involved to make huge coin before, during and immediately after the process.
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.