ANTHROPIC ASKS WALL STREET FOR TWO TRILLION DOLLARS

The company behind Claude filed on October 26 to go public on Nasdaq as ANT, with no price or date set yet. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley lead a group of 22 banks, and the listing could raise $100bn or more at a valuation of $1.5tn to $2tn, which would top the record SpaceX just set. Anthropic left the price and share count blank, because the first rule of asking for 2 trillion dollars is making the other guy say a number first. Now the books. Revenue was $16.3 billion in the first half, up from $1.1 billion a year earlier. The loss is $80.7 billion, and $72.4 billion of it came from marking up convertible notes, derivative liabilities and SAFEs, meaning the paper got more expensive because the company got more valuable. Strip the charges out and Anthropic made $974 million from running its business in the second quarter. They lost eighty billion dollars by doing well. Then there's the vibe. About 94 pages of the roughly 300-page filing are risk factors, including concerns that advanced AI could pose "catastrophic or existential risks to humanity" and a warning that no single insurer, and potentially the insurance industry in the aggregate, may lack the capacity to cover it. The founders open with an eight-page letter about an "age of miracles". They also created a special class F share that keeps 50.1% of the voting power with the founders.

Why you should give a shit: Record money is about to flow into a company that listed human extinction in the risk factors and kept 50.1% of the vote, so you can fund the experiment but you don't get a say in it.