‘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........

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