Gavin Baker (Managing Partner at Atreides) shared an interesting thread analyzing the potential 'public opinion and financial rhythm management' Anthropic might be doing ahead of its IPO. Here's his take on Anthropic's recent moves: 1. Financial metrics cleaned up to 'de-risk' He suggests Anthropic may have shifted ARR from gross revenue to net ARR, and excluded revenue sources like: - Meta-related income (rumored to be over $5 billion) - China distillation-related income The intention is pretty straightforward: 1) Since the market widely expects Meta to end their partnership post-IPO, excluding it now avoids embarrassment later if the deal falls through. 2) Reduces the likelihood of Meta actually pulling the plug (the 'quality of the watermelon' depends on how Meta perceives it). 2. Model release strategy: 'Let the competition play their hand first' 1) Anthropic released Fable 5.1 first, potentially encouraging OpenAI to launch Astra. Gavin thinks Astra feels very strong, possibly even exceeding Anthropic's expectations. 2) Rumors suggest Anthropic has solved the Navier-Stokes equations, which would be groundbreaking if true. 3) Gavin predicts Anthropic will release Fable 5.2 before the IPO, which should theoretically outperform Astra. At the same time, they might showcase significantly accelerated ARR growth in September and intentionally leak details to the media. 3. The next 6 weeks will be packed Gavin anticipates the next ~6 weeks will see a flurry of new model releases: - Grok 4.7 - Meta's Watermelon - ChatGPT 6.1 - Gemini 4 He notes that the confidence labs have in their roadmaps is something we haven’t seen in the past 18 months. But, as he says, 'the competition also gets a vote,' so plans might not unfold exactly as scripted. 4. Agent products are starting to diverge 1) Grok Bot: Gavin believes this is currently the best enterprise-grade agentic harness, representing a qualitative leap for its use cases. 2) Instinct: A consumer-grade agentic harness that seems to have potential. 3) Competitors are likely to launch similar variants soon. Meanwhile, overall AI demand continues to accelerate. Gavin sums it up in one phrase: Wild times. CFO as the hidden variable He thinks Krishna might be an exceptionally strong CFO. In summary, Gavin Baker believes Anthropic is doing three things simultaneously ahead of its IPO: - Cleaning up revenue metrics - Timing model releases to stay ahead of competitors - Building momentum for a September growth narrative At the same time, the entire industry is entering a new wave of intense model release cycles.