alt Hacker News> They have infinite money to burn so they aren't going to optimize.
IPOs aren't the magical moment that they were in decades past. You get to answer to a bunch of retirement fund managers and "the market", meaning less-savvy retail investors. You have to open up your books.
It seems like Anthropic, OpenAI, etc. are doing an IPO because they are literally out of other options. Older IPOs like Facebook felt different, like the hard part had been done, and they just had to scale. There's a difference in selling something because you want to, versus selling something because you have to. Facebook was just relying on the idea that they were a platform that more people would inevitably sign up for. For the most part, they did. It seemed obvious. They likely could have continued on by simply operating privately, but the IPO gave them capital to dominate the market.
Anthropic and other hyperscalers cannot continue on privately. They're facing a systemic shortage of capital to achieve their goals. They need the infrastructure, and there's not enough capacity to make enough for all of these companies to survive.
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Anthropic has ~$146.6 billion in cash on hand (Sept 2026). It's not out of options at this point. That's the second largest pile of cash on hand of any corporation in the US outside of Berkshire Hathaway and Google.
The cheap money days are likely over or rapidly diminishing. The next plot of cheap money to add to their pile, is public investors (if they hurry). They can raise $75-$100 billion that way, pushing their pile well over $200 billion. One assumes based on their obligations and expenditures projected over the coming 3-5 years, they'll need it.
Historically "need money to do big thing" is why companies sold shares.
This isn't new, rather it is a return to normal.