Five thoughts on the Anthropic IPO
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Five more thoughts about the Anthropic S-1, after a day of digging in:
1. Cash crunch fallacy? Conventional wisdom has been that Anthropic is going public, in part, because it needs the money. Kind of like why OpenAI is seeking around $30 billion after pushing its own IPO into 2027.
- Anthropic, however, had around $132 billion of cash and short-term investments as of June 30, which is more than 95% of what it's raised from private backers.
- Part of this is likely tied to timing, as Anthropic raised $65 billion of its venture haul just one month before the end of Q2. But it also hints at frugality or financing spend with convertible notes — or both.
- Also worth noting that the company has some long-term compute contracts that extend beyond its customer contracts.
2. Absentee VCs. Anthropic's logo is ubiquitous on VC firm websites, but the same cannot be said of VC presence in the S-1.
- The only firm identified is Spark Capital, which invested around $777 million since helping to lead Anthropic's Series C round in 2023 at a $4.1 billion pre-money valuation.
- Spark isn't there because it topped the 5% reporting threshold — it didn't — but rather because of related-party rules. One of its partners, Yasmin Razavi, is the only investor rep on Anthropic's board of directors.
- Speaking of Razavi, she doesn't do the public speaking circuit anymore (conferences, podcasts, etc.). Seems that she wants to let her investments speak for themselves, which is more than a bit refreshing.
3. Never mind? When Dario Amodei last month wrote about pacing the frontier, it seemed to suggest that Anthropic would try to serve as a more cautious/responsible example for others to follow.
- The S-1, however, says that "pacing the frontier" is just about establishing "industry-wide standards" and "does not describe our own model development or release timelines."
4. Unlock: Anthropic is borrowing from SpaceX's staggered lockup expiration schedule, which didn't cause SpaceX's stock price to crater like some had predicted.
- Some non-founder shareholders can sell up to 10% of their stock on the first day of trading, while there are additional unlocks on Days 27, 48, 62, 76, 180, and 365. Plus after the company reports full-year 2026 earnings.
- It does not appear that VC funds would be able to sell on Day 1, although that's more based on an absense of them being mentioned than an explicit exclusion.
5. Succession: Anthropic's cofounders will each be asked to nominate a ranked list of 10 successors for their voting powers, subject to approval by other cofounders, but the names (and priority rankings) of the people on those lists will be kept confidential.
- In other words, Anthropic has specific plans for who could help control the company in the future. But shareholders won't be let in on the secret.
