Former Facebook vice president Brian Boland, who was there for its 2012 IPO, argued in a Business Insider essay that Anthropic isn’t ready to go public and risks repeating Facebook’s mistakes. Boland said Facebook’s share price started to matter for hiring and deals once it listed, and Mark Zuckerberg gave every team that owned a product surface a revenue target, which over time pushed safety aside. He called Anthropic’s timing reckless because its S-1 spends so much space on the risks its own products pose, while CEO Dario Amodei has said even a year of slowing down would help it build safer models. Boland, now an advocate for progressive economics, wants Anthropic to wait until it has audited financials, a clear path to profit, and full disclosure of its circular investments and debt.
