#77: Anthropic IPO Countdown - The Latest Progress + OpenAI IPO Delayed

Craig Stevens (0:00)

It would be a huge mistake for Anthropic to delay its IPO again over the same old safety concerns. The market weighs catastrophic risk far better than viral former employee tweets. So get it done and let the market decide. We'll look at the current Anthropic IPO timeline and three new updates on its progress. In IPO radar news, the next logical step for IPO timid OpenAI, Motive pulls the plug and raises and Travis Kalanick's unfinished business for his startup, ATOMS. Welcome to the Access IPOs Podcast where we explore opportunities to invest in the world's most innovative and disruptive pre-IPO companies. I'm Craig Stevens, founder of Access IPOs and I'm back to a normal show format this week after last week's abbreviated version. And it's September and we really only have two, maybe three IPOs in the immediate pipeline that's Oura, Anthropic and maybe NScale, but they've been doing a lot of deals and we haven't heard much recently. The Oura amended filing could be available when you're watching the show. I'm recording this on Wednesday and that filing could drop as early as Thursday or Friday. The initial filing is already out there, but we're waiting for them to update terms. And at that point, the IPO roadshow kicks off and retail investors can start indicating interest at their brokers. And if that happens, I'll be talking about Oura next week and I may even try a live show on YouTube. Newsletter subscribers, keep an eye on your Sunday newsletter for more information about that potential live stream. Anthropic has already been delayed a full month. It was initially expected late September. Now it's expected late October. And that pushback may have even impacted other companies' decisions to go public, which effectively may push them off until 2027 Because as of today, the pipeline is pretty much dry. My guess and my hope is that the Anthropic IPO won't be delayed again. So assuming it's still a go, we're expecting to see that initial filing that will take us back to last week of September, first week of October. And I'm basing this off of the recent Reuters report by Echo Wang that gave us this timeline. So 15 days from that initial filing is going to take us to mid-October. And that's when we expect to see the IPO roadshow kick off. That's again when retail investors can start indicating interest at their broker. And that's when we learn about the offering, how many shares are going to be offered and at what price or at least at what initial price range. And we'll get a sense of what the Anthropic valuation is going to be at that point. So a mid-October roadshow would take us to the second to last or the last week of October for the actual IPO date. And according to that Reuters report, it said that Anthropic was considering an IPO days before the midterm election. So that suggests that last week in October, somewhere around the 27th through the 30th. That's all subject to change. I could be wrong in my interpretation of the reports and Anthropic is going through some stuff right now. So they may feel the need to pause this thing or push it off as well. But they've come a long way. I think they're ready to move forward. And they can always find an excuse not to IPO. But if they push off their IPO any further, it doesn't help the situation regarding safety and everyone's concerns about safety. They can certainly be public while addressing those concerns. Speaking of those concerns, we talked about Jacob Coxon last week about how he tweeted and another employee over-tweeted on that and talked about how they're really concerned about humanity with these AI models. Dario, Sam and Elon all weighed in to say, yes, this is an important concern and we are going to slow things down in terms of the frontier models. And now they're talking about ways that they can help each other mitigate the risks, put controls in place and to maybe collaborate with the government a bit to figure out what the right regulation is. But none of that should stop them from moving forward with the IPO. Sam Altman, on the other hand, used it as an opportunity to confirm that they are not IPO in 2026, saying it would be ill-advised, which was kind of a dig at Dario. But we know that OpenAI is not as ready as Anthropic, especially when it comes to their financials. So they were planning to go in 2027 anyways. I'll come back to OpenAI in the IPO Raider segment of the show today to talk about some other big news that hit the wires this week. But the focus of today's show is Anthropic and specifically how it's going to benefit from going public and why it shouldn't pause. And it's the same way that other companies can benefit, although not too many of them are stepping up to the plate right now. Even when the market is near all-time highs and the IPO window is wide open. Support for the show comes from VCX, the public ticker for private tech. For generations, American companies have moved the world forward through their ingenuity and determination. And for generations, everyday Americans could be part of that journey through perhaps the greatest innovation of all, the US stock market. But now that's changed. Today, our most innovative companies are staying private rather than going public. The result is that everyday Americans are excluded from investing and getting left further behind while a select few reap all the benefits. Until now. Introducing VCX, the public ticker for private tech. Now available wherever you buy stocks. VCX by Fundrise gives everyone the opportunity to invest in the next generation of innovation, including the companies leading the AI revolution, space exploration, defense tech, and more. Visit getvcx.com for more info. That's getvcx.com. An investment in the fund is speculative and involves substantial risks including possible loss of the entire investment. Carefully consider the fund's investment objectives, risks, charges, and expenses before investing. The fund's SCC filings, including any current prospectus in the fund's annual and semi-annual reports, are available at getvcx.com. Review them carefully before investing. This is a paid sponsorship. The host is long, VCX. Should Anthropic press pause on its potential $2 trillion IPO? That was the title of an article this week from The Economist, talking about the maybe new found risks that came out of this tweet storm that happened. The article mentions a guy named John Coffey, a securities law expert at Columbia Law. He says it's not unusual for companies to amend the S1 filings prior to an IPO, and this can be done quickly. He suggests that Anthropic already has a governance structure in place. We sure hope so, and they sure have plenty of money to hire attorneys and governance experts. It says once these disclosures are signed off by the SEC, it limits Anthropic's liability for securities fraud if disaster strikes. Product liability is a different matter, but the firm is likely to also have disclosed the risk of lawsuits in the S1 filing. So speaking of these catastrophic problems, the economist says if the warnings come true and assuming a few lawyers survive the calamity, Anthropic could face what David Sachs has called the mother of all product liability lawsuits. So this process of going public allows for these companies to put out that kitchen sink of potential risk and liabilities. And by doing that, they're actually lowering their litigation risk, at least from investors, or still product liability. You can imagine if someone uses Clod to hack into a bank and steal all the money, there'd be some sort of lawsuits in there. This comes back to that responsibility of these AI frontier model makers to put in some safety measures that would not allow the bots to go and say rob a bank, or not mess around with the electric grid. So it is possible that this was delayed to update the filing with some of these risks. But I think it's more likely we learned that there's this $15 billion credit facility, and that may have complicated the filing a little bit. Or this is just a really complicated filing, and they may need some extra time. One delay I think is okay. But if they delay again, I think there's going to be a problem that may end up having to go to 2027 And that's why I think they're going to move forward in that timeline I spelled out earlier. I think this is one of the unappreciated benefits of going public is stating all those risks out there. And the public is going to hold the company accountable because they are shareholders, and their investment relies on it. And public safety relies on measures that this company takes to maintain the safety of its models. This podcast is pro IPO. We want to see more companies going public so that we can invest in them for the long term. There are a lot of investors left out of this process. So a reminder of some other reasons to go public is it's an opportunity to raise a lot of money because there's more money available in the public markets. And once you're public, you can always issue more shares and raise more money. It also makes it easier to borrow because the financials are all out there in the open. The credit rating companies can give you a credit rating. There's just so much capital out there that's looking to be deployed. It's also an opportunity to bring in your customers as investors. We know customers make great long-term investors. And then one of the other benefits of Anthropic, in particular, going public, is it's going to help improve their public image because if you bring in public shareholders into this wealth creation that's happening, then they're going to be a bit more open to the side effects of AI that are getting into the bad press right now, like data centers and energy. Albeit, it's about $2 trillion late since the company hasn't gone public yet and we expect to see it go out at $2 trillion, but still relatively young company at five, five and a half years old. It's just grown so fast and it hasn't had the time to prepare for that public listing till about a year ago. And much of the growth has happened since they started talking about an IPO. We'll see how that valuation of two, maybe up to 2.3 trillion now we're hearing. We'll see how that holds up to the real public scrutiny of Wall Street, which may not be as kind as Silicon Valley, but Silicon Valley has already made their money. They're ready to move on to the next startup. There's been three new progress updates about this deal that we've learned about in the last seven to 10 days or so. I'm gonna run through these quickly. The first one is a report we got out of Business Insider and Katie Roof broke the story that Anthropic has chosen NASDAQ to list the deal. This is no surprise. It's a tech company, it's an AI company. NASDAQ seems like the natural fit, but this wasn't reported on yet. So it's a bit of a preview of what's to come in the S1. And we haven't got a lot of leaks of what's gonna be in that S1. The second thing we've learned recently is that Nvidia is considering a $10 billion anchor investment. And if the Anthropic IPO aims to raise 100 billion, which has been the report for a long time now, Nvidia could take 10% of those shares. They're not considering selling. They're looking to buy at the IPO price. And if Anthropic is considering anchor investors, there may be a lot more lining up to get in on those shares in addition to Nvidia. So that's going to potentially decrease the number of shares available for retail in this IPO. We haven't heard anything about the percentage of shares that will go to retail investors for this deal yet. Now Nvidia has already invested in the Anthropic. It committed 10 billion to its $380 billion valuation of Series G. So if this thing goes out at about a $2 trillion valuation, that's already a 5X for Nvidia and they're going to be investing even more. So if you're an Nvidia bull or you believe that Jensen has the Midas Touch, then that's one consideration. You have this massive company that's looking to make a giant investment at the same time that you potentially will get access to this deal, whatever that IPO price is. Then the third thing we learned about progress toward an IPO is that the FT reported that Anthropic is talking to investors and telling them that they're going to be profitable for the second quarter in a row going into this IPO. It's unclear if those were Wall Street investors or venture capital investors or what. And we take that with a grain of salt until we see the S1 filing and the financials. We'll see if private profitable is the same as audited public profitable. Sometimes in venture capital, these companies work with different numbers and they leak a lot of numbers and it's not clearly reported by reporters. When we get the S1 filing, we'll see the real numbers and be able to make our own determination to help us decide if we're going to invest or not. Everyone is excited to see that S1 filing and those numbers and we'll be pouring over that S1 filing the moment it comes out for the days afterwards. And just for the record, I am very likely going to be investing in this IPO. Me talking about it on YouTube may seem like I'm out here pushing this deal like, you should invest in this, but at $2 trillion, my talking about it here on the podcast isn't going to influence the price, but this is going to be the biggest IPO possibly in history and the number one trending technology ever, which is AI and one of the fastest growing companies ever. The most wealth creation we've ever seen within a five year period is pretty wild. So yeah, I'm going to be investing in this deal, but I'm going to wait until I see the S1 filing to determine if I'll be investing in this IPO for a trade or for a long term investment. I think I'll be leaning toward a long term investment because this is a generational company that likely has a lot of growth ahead of it. So full disclosure, yes, I'm going to probably invest in this deal and I'm probably going to hold it long term, but don't let that influence your decision whether or not to invest. Please do your own research, read the S1 filing and determine if it makes sense for you to invest either short term in the IPO or over the long term. Considering your personal financial objectives. Let's move on to IPO radar news. No radar rapid fire this week. Radar rapid fire. Feedback was very positive from that show. It was only 8 minutes long and I had some production constraints, so I decided to put together a quick show with shorter segments and turn it into that timer thing and sound effects and all. So if you didn't watch that show, check it out. It's only 8 minutes long. Let me know what you think. But I do want to speed up this segment a little bit more because then I can get through more companies and it leads to less editing for me and a faster show, which you guys probably appreciate. So I'm going to be getting through these companies, hopefully a little bit quicker. Although last week I had a teleprompter to help me just read through it really quickly. And this week I'm off the cuff again, which is how I normally do it. First up is OpenAI. Teased about this earlier this week. We know that Sam had already talked about delaying that IPO to 2027, which we already knew that was going to happen. It's always been a 2027 IPO. The only reason we thought it could be 2026 is that the CFO, Sarah Friar, left open that possibility in a letter to employees or a talk to employees. The CNBC article said that OpenAI will be a public company in 2027 She said, or sooner. That's not happening now, according to Sam Altman. That sounds like not 2026, 2027, potentially. I would say not 2026, yeah. I don't, like we got a lot of stuff to do. But what is happening, which isn't really a surprise, when you delay your IPO, you go out and consider new private funding. This tells us a few things. First of all, is that OpenAI needs the money. They are not profitable, which we've known, they are burning a ton of cash. It says here, an article from the Financial Times, George Steer and George Hammond, OpenAI has held early conversations with investors about raising another private funding round at a $1.2 trillion valuation before its planned IPO, as it seeks to capitalize on the success of its latest AI model. They last raised, not that long ago, they raised $122 billion at an $852 billion valuation. That was in March. That was a massive raise. I mean, unheard of, $122 billion. Just the fact that they were able to raise that much and come up with the capital. With this latest raise that they're considering at that $1.2 trillion, couple of things I will be watching for is what is the amount they're going to raise? Is they going to try to out raise that $122 billion? And the other thing I wouldn't be surprised to see is the opportunity for retail investors to participate in this round. Remember when SpaceX had declared that they were going to IPO, they quickly did around in December of 2025 to raise some capital before they went to IPO.