I think this is an overly negative take. The IPO is mostly primary issuance and the cash goes to the company. This extends Anthropic's runway into years rather than months. Crucially, this means revenue growth does not need to reaccelerate and can be allowed to slow to something resembling a healthy technology company.
The IPO has to happen ASAP because financial conditions are deteriorating for Anthropic and private capital has tapped out. They will need cash, they're out of people to get it from, and the cost to get it goes up every day.
I agree the fundamental question of whether Anthropic can grow past its fixed commitments is still a big unanswered question and that there are a lot of fundamental headwinds that you correctly brought up. But at least the IPO takes the business as it exists today seriously.
An IPO can be one of two things and it all depends on who knows what: a way to raise cash to fuel future expansion or a way to offload a lot of the risk onto people who have no knowledge about what is really going on behind the official filings. It could be both but that's unlikely and given that this is Anthropic who are already in my 'untrustworthy' book I am betting on the second. There will be something that they can legitimately claim was 'unforeseen' and then maybe the stock will substantially drop past the lock-up period. Unforeseen could range from 'oh look, our growth stagnated, who could have predicted that?' to 'Oh, look, those models we warned you against are eating our lunch' and many others besides.
This is a bubble, the question is whether it will fill out fast enough not to implode, taking earlier bubbles into account I don't think it will, and if it does it will wreck the economy and then it will still implode, only a bit later.
Sketch me a scenario please where they can grow a couple of orders of magnitude and the rest of the economy survives?
The lore is that Ford created the assembly line and paid his people wages high enough that they could afford the product they were making and effectively jumpstarted a massive upgrade in welfare. This is the exact opposite.
The IPO has to happen ASAP because financial conditions are deteriorating for Anthropic and private capital has tapped out. They will need cash, they're out of people to get it from, and the cost to get it goes up every day.
I agree the fundamental question of whether Anthropic can grow past its fixed commitments is still a big unanswered question and that there are a lot of fundamental headwinds that you correctly brought up. But at least the IPO takes the business as it exists today seriously.