The IPO ...

Photograph: Chris Ratcliffe/Getty Images

IPOs do weird things to people and organizations as greed, hype and the tell combine
to see just how many investors can we get to buy into "the next big thing."

IPO PR trick one, deny competitors to the family jewels

Anthropic is backtracking on a policy that would have covertly limited competitors from using its new AI model, Claude Fable 5, to develop other AI models. The company changed course after the move received significant backlash from the AI research community.

“We’re changing Fable 5’s safeguards for frontier LLM development to make them visible,” Anthropic said in a statement to WIRED. “We made the wrong trade-off and we apologize for not getting the balance right.” Anthropic released Claude Fable 5, a version of its latest AI model with additional safety guardrails designed to prevent misuse, earlier this week. Some of the safeguards Anthropic decided on were unsurprising: The company said it would reroute users who asked questions about cybersecurity, biology, or chemistry to a less capable AI model to reduce the chances of someone using the advanced AI to carry out a cyberattack or build a bioweapon.

But for researchers trying to use Claude Fable 5 for frontier AI development, Anthropic outlined a different approach. The firm would deliberately degrade the model’s performance in ways that were invisible to the user. The move would effectively sabotage researchers trying to use Claude to train competing AI models, which Anthropic explicitly bans in its terms of service.

Anthropic now says it’s changing course, and that Claude Fable 5’s safeguards for AI development will be visible to users. If the company suspects a user is trying to use Claude to build a highly capable AI, it will alert them that it’s either refusing the request or rerouting the user to a less capable model.

IPO PR trick two, the self evolving AI. Conway's Game of Life comes to mind here. :)

Taken far enough, and given enough compute, that trend points to an AI system capable of fully autonomously designing and developing its own successor. This is called recursive self-improvement. We are not there yet, and recursive self-improvement is not inevitable. But it could come sooner than most institutions are prepared for.

AI that can build itself would be a major development in the history of technology—one that could bring enormous good for the world in science, healthcare, and beyond. But full recursive self-improvement also might increase the risks of humans losing control over AI systems. If systems are capable of fully building their own successors, the ways we secure them, monitor them, and shape their behavior all grow much more important.

In English, what are we really talking about? Bloatware, lay code on top of code, requiring ever more compute but more ominously, it's inbreeding 101, the ouroboros eating its tail, a perfect way to hallucinate in new and better ways but you, my loyal investors .. we need ever more capital to makes this grand vision a reality, hence the upcoming IPO for the ages.

Wall Street analysts and financial forecasters widely expect the initial public offering (IPO)
to officially price and list around October 2026

A dragon-like ouroboros in a 1478 drawing in an alchemical tract[1]