Anthropic’s IPO is expected to happen in 2026, no exact date, but my guess is that it is soon. I love Claude, and use it for everything, so my first instinct is that I should own some of that. But let’s break it down:

Nobody is loyal. Basically, where is the money? Anthropic isn't just selling the $20 subscription that we use, the business is mostly tokens. About 80% of the money comes from businesses buying processing by the million, Claude Pro and Max together are something like 8% of revenue. The expensive model (Claude) and the Chinese model are getting harder to tell apart for ordinary work. When the premium version costs 20x and the gap in output narrows, the premium either shrinks or the customers leave. Note that 52% of enterprises now run two or more model vendors, that means nobody is loyal. For AI, switching is a config change, not a migration, meaning for businesses it carries a minimal cost.

The price is in the clouds. Last private mark was $965B in May. Some investors are now talking $2 trillion for October, that is a doubling in five months, and Fortune's reporting notes the number isn't fixed internally. What is heaviest in this valuation; the company or the optimism?

Keep in mind: If it prices near $2 trillion, it eventually enters the standard indices anyway. Which means the S&P fund you already own would give you a slice without you doing anything too brave.

When they're letting you in. Anthropic has been private since 2021. Every re-rating, including that 2.8x in under four months, happened in rooms where Google, Amazon, Sequoia sat, and no retail investors. The IPO is the first moment the door opens to retail, and it opens at the highest price the company has ever carried, no shade there, it's just the architecture of finance. The average IPO spends some point in its first year 48% below its high. (That number is crazy, so if you want to fact check that, it's LPL Research, 1,494 US listings 1995-2025)

In fairness, one detail cuts the other way; when Anthropic ran an employee share sale in February at a $350 billion valuation, investors wanted to buy $5–6 billion worth and most staff simply declined to sell. The people with the best information looked at $350 billion and decided it was too cheap.

Hostile Timing.I've written in previous issues about bond yields vs. S&P earnings yields. The 30-year is at 5.23%, the highest since 2007, and the market is pricing a possible Fed hike. High long rates are brutal for exactly this kind of asset: all the value is in cash flows a decade out, discounted harder every time yields rise. A trillion-dollar growth IPO into a rising-rate tape is the worst possible weather for Anthropic, but I’m not sure that will stop them.

To sum it up, the business is real, the revenue is real, the growth is extraordinary and the product is brilliant. The entry is what’s in question, and being first to a party has never been my edge, I'd rather arrive a little late.

As a part of my vacation itinerary, I went to Hospital de Sant Pau. The architect Lluís Domènech i Montaner essentially believed beauty contributes to a patient's wellbeing, therefore beauty functioning as clinical equipment. Pavilions set in gardens, windows placed at the height of a person lying down, so the view from a bed is greenery, and so on. Very wealth x health of them for the time being 1902.

The hospital consists of nearly thirty pavilions, every building oriented for sunlight, and colors chosen to calm patients: greens, blues, mauves. Tunnels dug underneath so patients could be moved with dignity, around the hospital that was built as a garden city.

Lluís Domènech i Montaner said that to heal, you must be in an environment that feels like life. That resonates deeply, but not only when you're already sick. It also applies to inspiration, ideas, creativity, rest, energy, and much more.

So why did we stop building like that? I find the loss of beauty in modern times fascinating, and not in a good way. Beauty as a health metric is far more important than I think most people realize, and there are countless ways to bring more beauty into a life, where the form matters much less than the priority. However it lands for you, it's an investment, and probably a good one. The returns are just harder to see and measure, which is probably why beauty has been so largely discounted, out of modern architecture and out of modern life.