Anthropic is asking Wall Street to believe in AGI

Today on Decoder, I’m joined by Joey Brookhart, an analyst at the chip and AI research firm SemiAnalysis, to help me dig into the story inside the numbers of the Anthropic IPO filing — a document known as an S-1. Anthropic just filed its S-1 to go public on the Nasdaq, and it could start trading as soon as next month at a valuation of anywhere between $1.5 trillion and $2 trillion. That would immediately make it one of the most valuable companies on the planet. But the price tag really isn’t the whole story here. The S-1 document published earlier this week is hundreds upon hundreds of pages filled with details that finally paint a picture of the economics of a frontier AI lab. As you might imagine, that picture is both really complicated and built on a series of very, very ambitious assumptions about the future and what AI will do to it. So I wanted to have Joey on the show to help break down what this document tells us, both about Anthropic’s finances and the broader AI economy. Joey and his colleagues at SemiAnalysis actually built a model of Anthropic’s finances from the outside back in July, so he’s been waiting for this filing about as eagerly as anyone, and I was excited to hear his take on what we’ve learned and, importantly, what we still don’t know. Okay: SemiAnalysis’ Joey Brookhart on the Anthropic S-1 and the costs and risks of building frontier AI. Here we go.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. Joey Brookhart, you are an analyst at SemiAnalysis. You’re also co-lead on SemiAnalysis’ Tokenomics model, which is going to come up a lot in this episode. Welcome to Decoder. Yeah, thanks so much, Nilay. I am very excited to talk to you. We’re talking just a couple days after the big Anthropic S-1 was filed. It’s our first look inside of the finances of one of the leading frontier models. What’s your take? What’s your read into it? It was an awesome S-1. It’s been a rough three weeks since the investor day. Some people were somewha