00:02:37 · Katie Prescott, Danny Fortson, S4
[00:02:37] S3: So just a small thing, but I can tell you, it's the budget. [00:02:40] S2: Oh, yeah. I mean, the budget, way more interesting. How many p, you know, tax or duty on petrol are we talking about? Like [00:02:49] S3: Two p on a pint, actually. [00:02:51] S2: Two pee on a [00:02:51] S3: pint? [00:02:52] S2: Oh my god. [00:02:52] S4: Really [00:02:53] S2: upsetting. To civilization ending AI, I think we know what's more important, especially to the British public. [00:03:00] S3: Two pee on a pint, I can tell you, is what everyone will be talking about down the pub. [00:03:05] S2: It's an outrage. [00:03:05] S3: Not Anthropics s one. Hello, and welcome to Times Tech, where each week we unpack how technology is reshaping our everyday lives. I'm Katie Prescott. [00:03:16] S2: And I am Danny Fortson. This week, it's the big one. Anthropic's IPO were inching closer to their blockbuster stock market listing in The US. On Monday, of course, it filed a 355 page prospectus, which, you know, has lots of details in there. Not only about how Anthropic works, but what its finances are and what the lay of the land is for the tech sector in general. [00:03:42] S3: Yeah. The first glimpse really inside Anthropic's finances, the mountain of money that the company is sitting on, but also that it's spending. With annual revenue that works out at $6,600,000 per employee at Anthropic. And it is going to be the first frontier AI company to go public. And that very lengthy [00:04:06] S2: The first pure one, right? Because you have SpaceX and Grok. Just
00:04:06 · Danny Fortson, Katie Prescott
[00:04:06] S2: The first pure one, right? Because you have SpaceX and Grok. Just [00:04:11] S3: count that as frontier AI? [00:04:13] S2: Yeah. Well, you know, if you ask Elon, Okay. It [00:04:17] S3: For a bit, pure. Semantics. First, frontier AI companies go public. And it was a busy day because that document landed at the same time as Meta announcing its plans to raise up to $95,000,000,000 through new stock sales. We'll get into that bit as well. But I think the big question is everybody just wanted to know how Anthropic finances were and whether it's really worth the $2,000,000,000,000 valuation that people have been talking about in the last few months. [00:04:46] S2: Yeah. So we're going to unpack all of that for you. But before we do that, just a little reminder. Each week, we bring you not one, but two episodes. This episode, which is, you know, kinda covers the news of the week. And then on Sundays, we have our big interview with the movers and shakers of the tech world. And this week is a really exciting one. I'm talking to Jaron Lanier, friend of the pod. He was on the podcast years ago. I went to his house in Berkeley. We're surrounded by musical instruments in his kind of music room. He's got dreadlocks down to his shins. He's just a totally fascinating person. He's a well respected computer scientist, futurist. And, you know, what a week to speak to him again on this week where we have this Anthropic IPO shooting for something between 1,750,000,000,000 and 2,000,000,000,000.
00:04:46 · Danny Fortson, Katie Prescott
[00:04:46] S2: Yeah. So we're going to unpack all of that for you. But before we do that, just a little reminder. Each week, we bring you not one, but two episodes. This episode, which is, you know, kinda covers the news of the week. And then on Sundays, we have our big interview with the movers and shakers of the tech world. And this week is a really exciting one. I'm talking to Jaron Lanier, friend of the pod. He was on the podcast years ago. I went to his house in Berkeley. We're surrounded by musical instruments in his kind of music room. He's got dreadlocks down to his shins. He's just a totally fascinating person. He's a well respected computer scientist, futurist. And, you know, what a week to speak to him again on this week where we have this Anthropic IPO shooting for something between 1,750,000,000,000 and 2,000,000,000,000. [00:05:41] S3: More than that of SpaceX earlier this year, which was, of course, the biggest ever stock stock listing, That IPO document, that S1, is very, very long. So we thought we'd break it down into three chunks. But first of all, I thought we should start with our overall impressions of it. There are similarities to the British government's budget, not least the leaks. [00:06:06] S2: There's no discussion of pints.
00:06:06 · Danny Fortson, Katie Prescott
[00:06:06] S2: There's no discussion of pints. [00:06:08] S3: There's no discussion of beer. I don't think. No. The similarity though is the leaks. And we've been talking about what's in this document for a few weeks now, and particularly the doom mongering in it. But I was really struck by how they push the responsible angle. So Anthropic's shtick has always been that they are developing AI responsibly with an understanding of its pitfalls, but with the hope and aim to navigate that safely for humanity. And they talk about that in the document, but also with the same premise on the financials as well. So I was really struck. They quote one of their investors telling them, Never let your company be worth a dollar more than it's worth. Anyway, so they're talking about this idea that they always try to under promise and over deliver. And so it's like, yes, we're carefully managing this potentially incredibly dangerous technology, but also the numbers look enormous, But you've got to trust us. We're not over egging the pudding here. [00:07:10] S2: I hope they don't over deliver on the whole civilizational annihilation aspect of things. Know, be like, woah, we underplayed that one. Bye bye, humanity. [00:07:21] S3: What did you... I mean, have you done some light reading?
00:07:21 · Katie Prescott, Danny Fortson
[00:07:21] S3: What did you... I mean, have you done some light reading? [00:07:24] S2: I have done some light reading. I've used ChatGPT and Claude to kind of pull things out. I have not read it cover to cover. Looking at it through this frame of... You know, because in the risk, you know, the risk factors, which is always, you know, boilerplate part of any IPOs, like, what could go wrong with this company? Where could we, you know, be undercut? How could your investment go badly as you, you know, you, new investor? And they spend a lot of time talking about the civilizational risk and losing control and all these things they've talked about before. And in that context, I thought it was really interesting where they lay out how, like, the governance of this company. Who controls Anthropic, who holds it accountable. [00:08:05] S3: And what jumps out on the governance front is that the seven founders, including CEO Dario Amodei and his sister, Daniela Amodei, have got a majority shareholding vote of 50.1%, which essentially means that if all of us buy a share in the company, we don't have any control over how it's run. And the reason they give for that is they say, Well, we need to be able to control things for the public good, because it has this very unusual public benefit corporation structure with a trust over the top of that, aiming to shepherd how it's wrong. But that is a rather unusual way of doing things.
00:08:05 · Katie Prescott, Danny Fortson
[00:08:05] S3: And what jumps out on the governance front is that the seven founders, including CEO Dario Amodei and his sister, Daniela Amodei, have got a majority shareholding vote of 50.1%, which essentially means that if all of us buy a share in the company, we don't have any control over how it's run. And the reason they give for that is they say, Well, we need to be able to control things for the public good, because it has this very unusual public benefit corporation structure with a trust over the top of that, aiming to shepherd how it's wrong. But that is a rather unusual way of doing things. [00:08:49] S2: Trust us. Yeah. And what's really interesting about that is also that single share retains that 50.1% voting power as long as there are at least three of the founders still at the company. So only when five of them have left does that thing kind of expire. So it's quite kind of ironclad And again, just gives them the power to be like, you know, usually when you buy into a company, you're buying a vote. You know, like, if you don't like how this company is run, you can vote to remove the CEO. [00:09:23] S3: And they set out the consequences of that, don't they? Quite clearly. They say, As a result, our governance structure may make it more difficult to replace our directors and management, including those seven co founders, and may have the effect of depriving our stockholders of an opportunity to sell their shares at a premium over prevailing market prices.