Good thoughts.

The last sentence doesn't make that much sense to me though. An agreement with Apple to be the lead AI partner would likely juice the IPO a great deal. The financial details wouldn't matter much for the IPO (as the initial financial commitments are going to be small but the halo effect would be real - I think it would in the market anyway).

I think Anthropic has real commitment to their way of doing things which can cause short term issues (and hurt the IPO). And they seem willing to keep those values rather than just making deals to pump the IPO. As you say Apple also sticks to their way of doing things even if it frustrates their partners.

I think not being the lead partner with Apple may well be good for Anthropic long term. But if all you cared about was the IPO just agreeing to Apple's terms likely would have been the best option.

These SpaceX, Anthropic and Open AI possible IPOs are so extreme it is hard to make judgements about them; so maybe there are Anthropic IPO issues to an Apple agreement that I don't appreciate.

It depends on what Apple wants and what Google was willing to give. Google is in many ways the weakest player in the individual-user facing space.

It's a weird market and these companies want global domination. TBH, i don't have the knowledge or context to understand how to think in that mode and what the real facts are.

I wouldn't put much stock in the deeply held principles of Anthropic (or Apple for that matter). That's an appeal to emotion. I love the product, but they're happy to randomly rug-pull the product and how it works, both in the publicly available products and other contexts. It's just another company.

I agree that Apple (and probably Anthropic) don't hold to the expectations some have. But I wouldn't say they are "just another company." I care about privacy more than Apple. But I think Apple does more to help privacy than any other huge company (and I can't think of another huge tech business to consumer company that does less to invade privacy, but I would be open to evidence I am wrong on that).

Apple is far from perfect but that doesn't mean they don't have a position (say privacy) that they care about and give a lot of weight to when making decisions. But as a huge company they also have many competing priorities.

Caring about privacy or potential abuses of LLM/AI services does not mean that a huge company is going to perform on those areas the way those that want maximum privacy or... want.

I do also believe Apple's marketing reasons to promote their focus on privacy make sense. And even if they don't do as much as I would want they do make a big difference (on privacy) it seems to me. And I believe long term there is big value to Apple building systems to stop users private data from being abused.

You say that, but don’t you think at this point they actually believe some of the stuff they say about safety and the future of humanity? It’s tough in this day and age not to be overly cynical but they did draw a line in the sand at the DoD and that wasn’t for IPO numbers…

I'm too cynical to believe the kubuki theatre.

The US government in 2026 is openly and cravenly corrupt, and I don't believe anything at face value. The story about the targeting may be real and material, or backwards engineered to fit the reality. OpenAI is aligned with Larry Ellison and Oracle, and given the favor granted to them by the government, I'd look to that relationship first.

Yeah, that makes more sense to me than "Anthropic had them over the barrel". Which seemed quite odd given the relative cash positions and installed base of each firm.