Op-ed urges SEC to block Anthropic IPO over $900B debts

Nearly $900 billion in spending commitments, most of them stretching into the 2030s. That figure, pulled from Anthropic's own amended registration statement, is the backbone of a November 2 op-ed in Tech Policy Press by Matt Scherer, co-author of a report titled 'Brace for Impact: Protecting people and the economy when the AI bubble bursts.' His argument is blunt: the SEC should block Anthropic's IPO until the company produces two consecutive quarters of audited financial statements.

The math starts with cash. Anthropic has $96 billion in reserves. Against that, its filing discloses at least $582 billion in non-cancelable spending commitments to just five companies: Amazon, AMD, Broadcom, Google, and Microsoft. 'Those obligations are effectively debts in a legal and practical sense: they are payments that Anthropic is contractually required to make in the future,' Scherer writes.

The physical commitments scale the same way. A 1 gigawatt data center costs an estimated $31 billion, Scherer notes, 'and the prices for some components are soaring.' Anthropic has committed to 15 GW of data center capacity in the coming years, and the company estimates it will ultimately need 20-25 GW.

On the demand side, he flags a 'tepid' commercial reception for the 'much-hyped Fable 5 frontier model' released this summer, and third-quarter 2026 numbers in which revenue growth 'slowed to a crawl over the summer.' The company's 2026 results, he adds, 'have not been subjected to formal auditing, which makes them less-than-reliable.' Three of the people on our Who's Who tracker shared the piece on day one.

The ask is narrow and procedural rather than a push to kill the listing outright. 'The SEC should block Anthropic's stock market debut until the company provides two consecutive quarters of audited financial statements,' Scherer concludes.