I think what is happening is that OpenAI is racing to IPO before Anthropic because their growth isn't as impressive. If you are the weaker company, you should IPO first to lock up the cash.
What's the evidence for Anthropic stagnating?
So we’ve got a combination of signs that they’ve been inflating their revenue growth, and signs that their customers are losing their appetite for contributing to that revenue growth. I suppose it’s not a slam dunk, but it feels to me like as strong an indicator as one could hope for a private blitzscaler startup like this.
Earlier this year they were telling a court their revenue was like 1/4 of what they had told the public.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.46...
Earlier this year they were telling a court their revenue was like 1/4 of what they had told the public.However, I do see a bit of reduced demand for hardware and datacenters which could reprice these companies to more sane multiples. There will be winners and losers.
Eventually, and likely in the lifetimes of most people living today, we would have to see something akin to universal basic income (UBI) that covers the necessities in order to stave off massive civil unrest.
If the white collar labor of human beings can’t compete with the output of AI, we either all become blue collar workers or we re-invent the concepts of work and play.
I’m not aware of any existing or proposed economy framework that adequately accounts for the automation that is nearly here at scale. We are not just automating away jobs - we are automating away the value that human beings have within a productive community. Before the mass starvation will come the mass suicide. Our culture teaches us that a feeling of self worth is derived from our perceived productivity. If we cannot feel successful, we may lose our wills to live.
Maybe, but history suggests there will be massive riots instead
They said exponential and you read unlimited.
To be clear, S&P hasn't announced a decision on this yet.
S&P don't get a choice around whether they announce their methodology or not.
That said, the rule change at the NASDAQ 100 doesn't seem to have impacted pricing or allocation. I can't imagine that many people are that concerned about this. (I posted the public-comment request from S&P to HN [1]. The response was crickets.)
Typically, you IPO when your private funding is drying up and/or some of your early lenders want to cash out.
It's worse for the new investors. (If it crashes.) It's great for the old investors. They got an opportunity to sell if they wanted. If they didn't, they still own their shares, except in a company that has that IPO cash sitting in its account.
Of course, some special souls are excluded from blackouts lol.
In the alternate timeline they would have held shares in a private company. They're still not really getting burned other than getting a tax bill.
In reality, corporations as a whole are seeing record profits continuing through 2026. Whether or not the average person is doing well is pretty irrelevant to the stock market: if companies are increasingly profitable, stocks go up.
Everything I hear about Anthropic points to a company that is actually closer to profitability and possibly already profitable, unlike many of its other peers.
We don't really look at YouTube as a failure and that product was unprofitable for many years. Nobody thinks the Uber bubble is going to burst even though it has never made back its investment money.
I think OpenAI is undisciplined and poorly run hence the insane burning of cash. Sam Altman is a terrible CEO and a conman. Anthropic is run by legit people.
Companies like Google, Microsoft, and Meta face essentially no negative consequence for burning cash. They have no urgent need to be efficient about their AI investments, even if they could be.
SpaceX is of course not profitable and has a lot of baggage but they still have a major asset, which is that Starlink prints utility company levels of money and is expanding both customer base and profit margins rapidly. Are they overvalued? Yeah, of course.
I’m not necessarily expecting a crash any time soon. (But we average a major correction, what? every 8 years? So if you keep predicting one long enough you will eventually have been right all along.) But I do feel comfortable saying OpenAI and Anthropic are overpriced. For more or less the same reason Cisco was overpriced in the late ‘90s. It’s not that what they were making wasn’t valuable; it’s that we got out over our skis a bit over how much of it the world could actually manage to consume in the immediate future.
Groupon got to pretty much 100% penetration, still crashed and burned right after IPO. I think Zynga followed a similar trajectory.
> "There's no way you'll hurt yourself walking to the living room"
> "Read history: people always think everything is fine ... until it isn't."
History is also replete with people constantly predicting collapses that don't come. Timing the market is very hard with numbers, it's total nonsense if one is just going off vibes.
The good news is that these folks seem to be in possession of a vibe-rator.
Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI are not banks. (Also, we had the largest bank runs in American history three years ago. The ordinary American barely noticed.)
Yes. Equity investors. The ones who buy hundreds of billions to trillions of dollars of American stocks a quarter.
Cause if that's the case, I see no reason for a government bailout should things go south. Nobody's pension would be affected by some private investor losing money on a bad investment.
But if that's not the case, then someone somewhere along the chain is acting as a bank, subject to a vibe-driven run.
Yes [1].
> Nobody's pension would be affected by some private investor losing money on a bad investment
...pensions also invest in the stock market.
> if that's not the case, then someone somewhere along the chain is acting as a bank, subject to a vibe-driven run
You're confusing deeply unrelated concepts. Whether or not someone who loses money is politically sympathetic has nothing to do with whether they're at risk of a bank run.
[1] https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/20260319/html/f22...
If pensions invest in the stock market, then they are de-facto acting as a bank. And last I checked, in the land of the free, you get to withdraw your 401k should you vibe with the decision to do so [please don't do this based on this post alone].
What does this mean? Who do you think benefits from a bailout?
> If pensions invest in the stock market
Pensions are private investors. And pensions invest in all kinds of things. Plenty are already shareholders in these companies.
> last I checked, in the land of the free, you get to withdraw your 401k should you vibe with the decision to do so
This is a non sequitur. Nobody disputed this. And 401(k)s are not pensions.
So just buy the dip if it actually crashes.
The bubble can't pop until after an IPO, and that doesn't mean "immediately after".
You can't have a run on a privately held company.