THIS ANTHROPIC IPO IS THE MOST DANGEROUS DEAL I'VE SEEN IN MY 45-YEAR CAREER
The Noble Update PodcastShow Notes
Anthropic's own IPO filing tells you why:
The prospectus warns that its AI models could resist being shut down and could hide or manipulate information. If you run security at a big bank, that's the last thing you're letting anywhere near your customers' money.
The surveys back that up too: 69% of IT and security leaders say security worries are slowing down their AI agent rollouts, and only 1 in 5 American businesses use AI in any part of their work.
And the revenue Anthropic does have leans on a VERY short list. Nearly 25% of last year's sales came from just 2 customers, and plenty of its big customers aren't locked into long-term contracts.
Now look at the bills:
Anthropic has signed up for $518 billion of computing over the next decade, and 80% of it gets paid whether the customers show up or not. The filing says so itself: "If our actual spend falls short, we must pay Google the difference."
What could possibly go wrong?
Every dollar of that $518 billion sits in somebody else's revenue forecast. Wall Street's tech analysts have the sector's cash flow doubling to $2.4 trillion by 2028, and the analysts who cover the customers are forecasting a much smaller pile of cash to pay for it.
Wayne Gretzky's father famously taught him "to skate to where the puck is going, not where it's been." For 3 years the puck was chips and data centers, and the people selling them got rich.
Now the puck is heading to the customer, and the customer is SCARED.
At $2 trillion you're paying for NARRATIVE DOMINANCE, a story where every company on earth runs on AI. When the customers don't show up on schedule, most of that $518 billion still comes due, and whoever holds the stock eats the difference.
We skated to where this puck was going a long time ago:
In January we showed you that most CFOs couldn't point to any measurable return on their AI spending. Those CFOs sign the checks this whole thing depends on, and 8 months later their security teams are still standing in the doorway.
In May I told you SpaceX's record IPO would be forced into the index funds on its 15th trading day, and that your 401k would be the exit liquidity. On July 7 it joined the Nasdaq-100, and the funds tracking it had to buy an estimated $4.3 billion of stock.
Anthropic is next in line. AND THIS IS MUCH MORE DANGEROUS.
$2 trillion IPO, record spending, and no customers.
If they can't get money from investors it's OVER for the whole AI boom.
Own businesses whose customers are paying them today, like energy, and let somebody else pay $2 trillion for customers that haven't shown up yet.
Don't be the exit liquidity.
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