‘A pressure cooker ready to explode’: The wild secondaries scramble for Anthropic shares

A feeding frenzy in the animal kingdom is, at its core, vicious competition. The idiom “feeding frenzy” gained prominence in the mid-century, first primarily to describe the behavior of sharks frenetically ripping into large schools of fish. It’s chaotic, ruthless, and triggered by the perception of abundance. And I suspect the phrase gained popularity both because it’s evocative, and because there’s more than one kind of shark out there. And right now, quite a few sharks are circling the secondaries market around Anthropic, which is widely expected to go public this year (as is rival OpenAI). If you’ve missed the ruckus: Anthropic, the maker of Claude and last publicly valued at a now-quaint $380 billion, is raising a new round of funding—the company’s reportedly looking to rake in as much as $50 billion at a valuation in the $900 billion ballpark. And talking to brokers, investors, and founders about it, they all had the same, clear message: This is not normal. “Anthropic has all this clumped-up, pent-up demand, and it’s like a pressure cooker ready to explode,” said Hari Raghavan, an angel investor and founder who’s currently starting a new fund with longtime private capital markets executive Clara Vydyanath. “If you have pent-up demand and a lack of clean paths you can use to vent the exhaust, what happens is that the whole thing blows up.” And the demand for Anthropic is explosive, four industry insiders agreed. At the start of this decade, Anthropic didn’t exist, and this year, the company’s ostensibly set to take in $45 billion. This reported (and eye-watering) figure appears to be annualized revenue run rate, which is definitionally dicey—it’s a snapshot-estimate of where revenue will land if recent pace holds. That number isn’t reality, not yet. But reality isn’t the driving force around the tidal wave of demand for Anthropic shares. It all started in late April, when Anthropic put out a call for investor allocations: The message? You want a block of