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

134 points cdrnsf 2 hours ago 78 comments

davidguetta 1 hour ago | parent

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) ?

gloryjulio 1 hour ago | parent

Spacex is not included in sp500 yet. Nasdaq is the one fast tracked spacex to dump on the retails

andriy_koval 1 hour ago | parent

Many funds use Russel indexes, which included SpaceX already

JumpCrisscross 1 hour ago | parent

Many funds use lots of indices. Very few dollars are being forced to buy these offerings.

andriy_koval 1 hour ago | parent

Russel indexes are used by very large funds, e.g. vanguard usually track russel

edoceo 1 hour ago | parent

Which Vanguard and at which weight?

andriy_koval 1 hour ago | parent

the largest 2.3T is https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/VTI/ which tracks CSRP which fasttracked SPaceX

derektank 49 minutes ago | parent

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 41 minutes ago | parent

this article says crsp changed policy too: https://www.morningstar.com/funds/spacex-ipo-how-index-funds...

JumpCrisscross 32 minutes ago | parent

How many marginal dollars from that went into SpaceX?

The index drama was mostly a creation of influencers.

andriy_koval 18 minutes ago | parent

so you saying you know exact number affected by index drama, and it is small? What is that?

derektank 1 hour ago | parent

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.

andriy_koval 1 hour ago | parent

Per https://www.tradingview.com/symbols/NASDAQ-SPCX/ SpaceX curreng float is 4.29B shares or about 600B USD, not that small grab from pension funds.

nh23423fefe 58 minutes ago | parent

its like 2.5% of nasdaq. any crsp tracking fund would be 0.2%

andriy_koval 47 minutes ago | parent

I think all mentioned numbers: 2.5% of Nasdaq, 0.8% (as per market cap from https://indexes.morningstar.com/indexes/details/morningstar-...) of crsp, 600B usd are large enough to just give them to trillioners.

judge2020 1 hour ago | parent

The S&P 500 denied early admission to SpaceX.

phyzix5761 1 hour ago | parent

There's a 12 month waiting period plus the company has to show 4+ quarters of positive net earnings before qualifying to be included.

millspore 1 hour ago | parent

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?

JumpCrisscross 1 hour ago | parent

No.

msy 1 hour ago | parent

The SEC's obligation is to all market participants, not just index fund holders.

cgio 1 hour ago | parent

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 1 hour ago | parent

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 1 hour ago | parent

> 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

phyzix5761 1 hour ago | parent

12 month waiting period plus 4+ quarters of profitable earnings before you qualify for inclusion.

JumpCrisscross 1 hour ago | parent

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.

andy_ppp 1 hour ago | parent

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.

digitaltrees 1 hour ago | parent

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

yorwba 1 hour ago | parent

Maybe the SEC should instead block funds from distorting the market by making large predictable transactions, then.

phyzix5761 1 hour ago | parent

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 31 minutes ago | parent

> mandatory purchases by the index funds

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

zer00eyz 1 hour ago | parent

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 1 hour ago | parent

Why do you think they will delay the IPO? I bet there's enough demand to buy their stock.

xur17 1 hour ago | parent

> if I was one to bet

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

stockresearcher 1 hour ago | parent

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 58 minutes ago | parent

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.

nh23423fefe 53 minutes ago | parent

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?

spiderice 24 minutes ago | parent

The "the usual song and dance people" of letting people choose what to do with their money. Sure bud.

katbyte 23 minutes ago | parent

Maybe the stock market shouldn’t be people’s retirements?

stockresearcher 22 minutes ago | parent

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 7 minutes ago | parent

I won't be surprised if audit find another few 100B of hidden debt

demo4567 1 hour ago | parent

The SEC should SEC to protect the public.

cowlevel 1 hour ago | parent

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.

jawiggins 1 hour ago | parent

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 1 hour ago | parent

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"

NewJazz 1 hour ago | parent

Better to dump it when valuation is low instead of inflated.

jawiggins 1 hour ago | parent

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 50 minutes ago | parent

Most 401ks and pension funds do not invest in pre IPO companies, this is just blatant misinformation

JumpCrisscross 38 minutes ago | parent

> 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...

bryan_w 13 minutes ago | parent

Who said anything about 401ks?

drdrey 3 minutes ago | parent

some pension funds definitely do

xienze 52 minutes ago | parent

Aren't they still losing billions per year?

singron 1 hour ago | parent

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.

stingraycharles 1 hour ago | parent

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.

applebottomjean 1 hour ago | parent

If companies were already profitable why would they go public?

stingraycharles 52 minutes ago | parent

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.

infinite_spin 41 minutes ago | parent

public investment can be magnitudes larger than your profit, allowing growth that would otherwise not be possible

ben_w 27 minutes ago | parent

Same reason they take private investments or loans: To grow faster than would be possible without that.

CamperBob2 9 minutes ago | parent

Elon Musk gave Trump $290M.

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

Dario Amodei gave Trump a hard time.

Do the math...

alistairSH 1 hour ago | parent

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.

JumpCrisscross 34 minutes ago | parent

What makes you think Anthropic isn’t audited?

nicce 17 minutes ago | parent

That is something obvious to add on relevant public materials.

wqtz 59 minutes ago | parent

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 58 minutes ago | parent

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.

titanomachy 55 minutes ago | parent

> 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.

Jedd 41 minutes ago | parent

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.

Bender 32 minutes ago | parent

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 28 minutes ago | parent

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?

forbiddenvoid 26 minutes ago | parent

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.

ecommerceguy 21 minutes ago | parent

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 8 minutes ago | parent

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.

simonw 9 minutes ago | parent

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

gruez 2 minutes ago | parent

"ai use remained relatively steady" =/= "Americans using AI at work fell significantly "

hannasanarion 1 minute ago | parent

Found the paper: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5136877

It's 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.

zzzeek 48 minutes ago | parent

I'm sorry, evacuate? In our moment of triumph?

marsten 36 minutes ago | parent

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 8 minutes ago | parent

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."

JacobAsmuth 6 minutes ago | parent

Unless you're accusing Anthropic of misconduct in their financial reporting obligations I fail to see the connection.

Arubis 18 minutes ago | parent

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.

kazinator 6 minutes ago | parent

[delayed]