Anthropic Readies a $965B IPO and Courts Cyber Allies

Craig: anthropic just fired the first shot in the $33,000,000,000,000 public ai war by secretly filing for a massive 965,000,000,000 ipo. they aren't selling a better chatbot to consumers. they're pitching wall street on an ai cyber weapon that just leaked ahead of openai. so they just filed a trillion dollar ai ipo, you know, $45,000,000 short or a billion dollars short, which will probably go up over time. anthropic has confidentially filed a draft form s one with the sec to go public fresh off a $65,000,000,000 fund rent funding round. instead of relying on consumer apps, the company is anchoring its staggering 965,000,000,000 valuation on claude mythos, an advanced ai model capable of autonomously uncovering deep software vulnerabilities. this completely flips the script, ai script from viral productivity apps to nation state grade digital infrastructure, forcing openai and other companies to accelerate its own public market plans. what do you think about this, john?

Jon: i love it. you know me. i've always been a fan of anthropic and claude even before it was cool. and, i'm so happy for them. i think that they're doing things right. so just a a couple things. so we don't know who the underwriters are of this, but, obviously, i think they've, like, obviously, they probably reached out to, like, goldman sachs, morgan stanley, jpmorgan chase, like, all the big names. and this is gonna be interesting because it looks like they're they're going ipo or they're going public in the fall, early early fall at the earliest. and so they're going public after spacex goes public, which has xapi. now, obviously, spacex's ipo is not indicative of what's gonna happen to anthropic, but there's ai built into that, and that's a huge proponent. so what are your thoughts on kind of the spacex ipo being a precursor to anthropic's ipo? do you think there's a correlation there or not at all?

Craig: well, i mean, we're coming into ipo season, and it's starting to get hot where it got cold for a long time. i think there is a correlation because what we're going to see is a huge valuation with x, and they're gonna come in at the other end of it. the question i have when i say x, sorry, spacex and, oh, the big, ipo that includes all of stuff that a, elon's doing with the spacex and xai, and they're gonna roll tesla in there eventually if they haven't done that already. the question becomes, if that's a trillion dollar company, what is anthropic worth? and i sit back and say, okay. is anthropic worth this because of the one product mythos? i wonder because how long till the code it's leaked already. how long till, one of the other companies just basically, copy it?

Jon: i don't think this ipo is based on products and revenue largely. i think this ipo is more based on the future of ai, the possibility of agi, the control of ai infrastructure, access to compute, and the future of knowledge work. so i know i'm generalizing it a little bit, but i think it's when when when companies go ipo, like, for example, meta or google, investors largely bet on products and revenue. whereas, yes, anthropic does have revenue, but i think this is more of a looking forward at the future. and anthropic has set itself up with strategic partnerships with, with their structure and all that sort of stuff, from the get go and doing things right with each round of funding. right? they just raised a round of funding. like, what? a month ago, they just closed 9,000,000 900 our valuation, 900,000,000? yeah. 900 billions? i can't remember. anyways it

Craig: was 65,000,000,000 at an, estimated value of $9.65.

Jon: yeah. and so, there's a lot going on here. and so,

Craig: there's a lot going on, but i let me ask you this. and yeah. you know, when is everyone gonna admit we're kind of in a bubble? like, september, their latest round exceeds openai's 850,000,000,000 valuation. now they're doing an ipo. opening eyes talking about that potentially as well, and, spacex is doing it. they're all gonna leapfrog each other. they're all gonna say, okay. well, anthropic is now worth a trillion dollars, so we think we're worth a trillion 4. and so that'll bump. and then the next about you know? so that becomes how much of this is real? and how much is it is silicon valley, vc bumping each other?

Jon: so i think out of all of these ai, i think anthropic might be the most real given their contracts and things like that even though they got blacklisted, but now the government's back. i think and going back to your your point about mythos, i think, i think this is less we'll call it vaporware or less kind of, trying to pull the cover over our eyes, and i think this is more real than most. but that being said, there is still that circular type of of money that's going around. but, again, going public, that will allow more money to be injected into this company. that's not part of that circular kind of, where the circular money that's going around, if that makes sense.

Craig: yeah. and let's be clear. the reason why everyone's pointing at mythos is because a series eight sixty five billion raise in may was based on the hot mythos news. so everyone thought this was good. at investor level, was investing because mythos was hot, and this is going around. and now we're going ipo. the latest valuation is based on, you know, how hot mythos was. that's all. so whether, you know, we're doing, that alone is worth a certain amount because all enterprise need to have that or an equivalent product or they're gonna get dominated by, you know, foreign competitors even, other bad actors. you know, how many times we've seen malware, the bitcoin stuff where it, takes control of your computer and locks everything out? soon as this kind of tool is out there, that kind of stuff will be happening all the time. so i guess there's a concern. however, anthropic seems to be moving in the right direction. are they a billion dollar company? are they not a billion dollar company? oh, sorry. trillion dollar company. time will tell. so spacex is targeting a 2,000,000,000,000 valuation and seeking to raise more than 75,000,000,000. openai is expected to file for its own initial pop book offering soon, and anthropic is now part of this race with the valuation approaching a trillion dollars. they also note these listings could push major indices like the nasdaq one hundred toward even greater concentration in capital intensive ai issuers, which, you know, i'm a little concerned for the nasdaq, but that's a separate discussion.

Jon: i think spacex is more of a concern for the s n for for whatever index they're going on than anthropic is. i think spacex is more vaporware and more bs than anthropic, but that's just me.

Craig: i guess if you wanna have that discussion, love that, but let's keep those separate. now i just wanna say that there is vaporware in spacex, but there's also some vaporware in anthropic. i just think you're right. it's less than anthropic, but i also think there's a lot of spacex around, around robots, around a bunch of other stuff that is, but you can't deny what they're doing on rockets. you can't deny what they're doing with some of these other things. so the question is, how much of that $2,000,000,000,000 valuation is based on vaporware? 25%, 50%? i'm not disagreeing with you. yeah. but it's no different than what openai and all these other companies are pushing a future vision of the product that's gonna look like x, y, and z.

Jon: so i think it's different because and this is just me, and this just could be how this company has done it. but, they've they've been more transparent. they've stood their ground when it comes to a lot of things. i feel like i would give them way more benefit of the doubt than any other ai company out there.

Craig: i'm not saying that. yeah. i'm not giving anybody the benefit of the doubt, or i'm not saying point fingers at anyone else. we all know elon is a massive hype man, and that's his, if nothing else, one of his specialties is promotion, marketing, and government contracts. so, all that aside, having a hardware company, having rockets, having this technology, and these government contracts related to spacelink and, star shield, starlink, and all that stuff, how does that compare? we're talking about value, from a company point of view. and let's face it. anthropic is also paying, x billions of dollars a month to run on their hardware. so it's a very incestuous relationship all around. i get that, we hear a lot of bs from elon musk more than most people because he's out and loud and proud, but that doesn't mean the announcements from other people have less, i'm gonna say, are less conservative in their financial projections of what their future is gonna be.

Jon: for sure. yeah. no. i

Craig: just need

Jon: to believe that anthropic has gone about this as, oh, they've like, there's there's very little controversy surrounding them except with the government, but that wasn't their fault. that was the government's, kind of well, at least from what we know.

Craig: well, before we move away from that point, you do know anthropic had two rules. no foreign, sorry, domestic, surveillance

Jon: yeah.

Craig: and no, automatic firing of weapons.

Jon: yeah.

Craig: and the us government, when they came at them, said, let me give you a scenario. and the scenario was, there's an icbm flying at new york. can i use your software to shoot it down or not? and the answer from anthropic was, well, you need to call us and we'll work it out. and that was unacceptable, and that's where all the trouble began.

Jon: no. but what i'm saying is it's not it wasn't anthropic. it wasn't controversy from anthropic being disingenuous. it's the gover it was from the government trying to get anthropic to do things that they weren't comfortable doing, and they stood their ground.

Craig: i'm not on either side of the fence on this one.

Jon: okay.

Craig: i'm saying this is what happened. the government wants something that's gonna shoot down that icbm missile without having to call somebody and wait on hold and hopefully get a hold of somebody before new york close-up. that doesn't mean they can't use anthropic in any other part of the system or they shouldn't have, called it a security threat or whatever. i can't remember what the exact title was. doesn't

Jon: mean they should

Craig: have done that. i'm just saying that i want our governments to be able to defend, but where does this slope stop? i'm not saying anthropic is wrong. i'm not saying anthropic is right. i'm just saying this is what happened, and that causing this conflict. yeah. i'm okay, with both sides having their stance because i think anthropic is drawing their line. and as a company, they can draw the line. and as a government, they can decide not to use them. i think the lawsuits in between are gonna work themselves out about should they have affected policy or not. so we'll let that kinda yeah. work itself out. so anthropic's revenue run rate exploded from 9,000,000,000 to 47,000,000,000 in mere months on the cybergym vulnerability reproduction benchmark. cloudmethos scored 83.1% compared to cloudopus, 4.6 at 6.6%, autonomously generating working exploits on its first attempt in more than 83% of test cases. during the early red teaming, mythos exposed critical security flaws that survived decades of human inspection, including a sixteen year old bug found in ffmpeg and a twenty seven year old vulnerability in security focused open bsd operating systems. so there's a lot of stuff going on. anthropic dramatically increases political footprint ahead of the listing, spending $1,600,000 lobbying in q one twenty twenty six alone, a massive jump from 360,000 previously, largely due to a high profile legal battle with the pentagon over the supply chain, back blacklisting we just talked about. so, anthropic isn't just trying to chat your pt. they're trying to become an indispensable backbone of global cybersecurity as well as business infrastructure before the public even gets a chance to trade a single chair. so with anthropic valued higher than openai, would you risk your own cash on this trillion dollar ipo when it goes public, or is this hype leaving individual investors, too little, on the upside? so let us know in the chat, john. would you invest? absolutely.