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Anthropic pre-IPO whispers: Navier–Stokes?
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summary
Gavin Baker frames an explicitly speculative Anthropic pre-IPO note: net ARR accounting, model-release sequencing, competitor roadmaps, and a rumor that Anthropic has solved Navier–Stokes. Treat that claim as unconfirmed—no paper, prize citation, or lab confirmation is offered. Anish Acharya replies with separate business predictions (pay-per-use consumer margins, Preserved Thinking, Mythos outcomes) and stresses he has no insider information. If a genuine existence-and-smoothness proof for 3D Navier–Stokes appeared, it would settle a Clay Millennium Problem with deep consequences for mathematical fluid dynamics, though engineering CFD practice would still need numerical methods.
debate
- Rumor, not result. Baker labels the whole post pure speculation and only reports "whispers" of a Navier–Stokes solution; nothing here constitutes verification.
- Pre-IPO narrative. Baker reads Anthropic's shift to net ARR, distillation exclusions, and Fable/Astra sequencing as gamesmanship ahead of a public listing.
- Competitive stack. He expects near-term model releases across labs and praises agentic harnesses such as Grok Bot and Instinct amid rising AI demand.
- Business reply. Acharya adds consumer-plan GM+, Preserved Thinking as a revenue lever, and Mythos-style outcome selling rather than engaging the math rumor.
- Millennium context. A true proof of existence and smoothness for 3D Navier–Stokes would resolve a Clay Millennium Prize problem; it would clarify whether smooth solutions always exist or singularities can form, with implications for theory more than an immediate CFD replacement.
key quotes
“Now there are whispers that Anthropic has solved Navier-Stokes, which would be super impressive.”
“(BTW all of this is personal speculation - i have no insider information).”
conversation
Gavin Baker @GavinSBaker
Anthropic pre-IPO gamesmanship post. Pure speculation but sharing as curious for thoughts.
Anthropic shifted from gross to net ARR accounting and stripped out both Meta and Chinese distillation from their $65 billion ARR number. Meta speculated to be over $5 billion in ARR so taking them out means they can easily weather it when Meta turns them off shortly after being public, which is widely expected. Also decreases the odds of Meta turning them off, watermelon quality dependent. All smart.
Then release Fable 5.1 so OpenAI feels confident releasing Astra. Vibes here on Astra are really good btw. I think that Astra was probably better than Anthropic was expecting.
Now there are whispers that Anthropic has solved Navier-Stokes, which would be super impressive.
Anthropic probably releases Fable 5.2, which should be better than Astra unless something is awry, sometime before the IPO. Likely also planning on showing a significant reacceleration in ARR in September which will of course leak to the press.
Grok 4.7, Meta’s Watermelon and ChatGPT 6.1 all likely coming in the next 6 weeks as well. All those labs are confident about their roadmaps in a way I have not seen in the last 18 months. And we will see about Gemini 4. Competitors get a vote in all these plans.
Grok Bot feels like the best agentic harness yet for enterprise use cases and Instinct is a promising agentic harness for consumer use cases. Should see variations of both from competitors soon. Grok Bot remains transformational for my use cases.
And all this is happening into a continued acceleration in overall AI demand.
Wild times.
As an aside, I think Krishna might turn out to be an exceptional CFO. His former Blackstone colleagues speak super highly of him. Going to be important as communicating clearly to Wall Street if they decide to shift their compute from inference to training will be difficult to digest the first time. Probably worth studying Amazon’s invest and then “check-in” margin strategy from 2010 through maybe 2016, which investors eventually understood.
Anish Acharya @illscience
Here are a few other predictions/surprises re: Anthropic:
- The (subsidized) consumer plans are actually very GM+ because the features that select for hardcore users are all pay-per-use (ultra code/review/plan + excess Fable usage)
- The recent change around "Preserved Thinking" was intended to break routing more than distillation and will increase revenue per task significantly (platform.claude.com/docs/en/build-…)
- Mythos is the first of many models that will be vertically integrated into industries and sold as outcomes vs APIs. Dario described token-level price discrimination based on outcomes so this shouldn't come as a surprise.
Overall I think the market underweights how sophisticated anthropic has been in aligning its business interests with its technical and mission interests.
(BTW all of this is personal speculation - i have no insider information).