Is Anthropic’s $1.5T IPO Cracking?

The Nasdaq 100 dropped 6% Thursday, losing a record $2.3 trillion, while the Philadelphia Chip Index fell 12%. Gabelli’s Justin Bergner said scarcity pricing and margins in AI-linked memory and data-center suppliers were being unwound because investors now expect a longer buildout and looser supply. Barclays expected volatility-control funds to sell about $135 billion of U.S. equity futures over 24–48 hours. Wells Fargo’s Oshan Kwan also warned of possible Texas data-center regulation, though JPMorgan said the move looked more positioning-driven than a fundamental rotation.

Anthropic is targeting an IPO the week before Thanksgiving that could raise up to $100 billion at a $1.5 trillion valuation, but three prospective investors said the price may need to fall, with one estimating roughly $1 trillion. Investors want to see October results; Anthropic’s revenue run rate reportedly exceeded $80 billion at October’s end, while it held $146.6 billion in cash on September 30. The company could raise closer to $80 billion, delay the offering, or preserve flexibility as executives meet with advisers.

Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab introduced Inkling 2 Small, a mixture-of-experts model with 594 billion total and 17 billion active parameters. It processed 8.4 trillion tokens in 68 hours, then 3.8 trillion more, and used a nine-day reinforcement-learning run across 2,048 GPUs. Artificial Analysis gave it an Intelligence Index score of 31, up 18 points; AutomationBench rose from 5% to 46% and Frontier Code from 5% to 25%. But it cost about $1.18 per task versus $0.20 for the earlier model, and its weights are planned under Apache 2.0 after safety testing.

Elon Musk said Tesla will wind down Cybertruck production at its Texas Gigafactory around mid-2027 to make room for increased Cybercab output. The vehicle, unveiled in 2019 and launched in 2023 as a futuristic “battle tank,” suffered weak sales, recalls, and safety issues: Cox Automotive counted 11,586 U.S. sales from January through September, down 28% year over year and representing 1.6% of EV sales. That compares with Musk’s original annual target of 250,000–500,000 trucks; SpaceX has become a major buyer.

Anthropic’s Personal Finance mode lets U.S. Pro, Max, and Ultra subscribers connect unlimited bank and credit-card accounts through Plaid with read-only access. Claude can inspect up to two years of transactions, balances, limits, and account details, then answer spending questions and create adjustable charts, tables, and dashboards. Conversations in the finance hub are not used for model training, and the feature has no ads or financial products. Anthropic says Claude can show the transactions behind calculations, but still advises users to verify important information with their bank.

The New York Times reported that Microsoft offered buyouts to 60,000 workers as AI spending accelerates. Employees described stagnant pay, pressure to use unreliable AI tools, and declining job security even as quarterly profit rose 32% to $36.6 billion on $92.3 billion in revenue; capital spending reached $45.2 billion and expected annual spending about $170 billion. Some workers accepted buyouts despite financial risks, while others stayed to change the company. Several said merit raises were below 1%, and a departing design leader called the past three years increasingly grim.

McCullough said he was flying to Dubai for the Sharjah International Book Fair, where his book How the Internet Happened has sold strongly in Arabic. He plans to speak about parallels between the internet era and the AI era, join panels, and talk with university students. Because of travel and the time difference, next week’s episodes may appear at unusual times, though he expects to publish daily until returning Thursday. He also plans to share a sample of the Startup Bios podcast and encouraged listeners to subscribe.