Ex-Facebook VP Warns Anthropic IPO Repeats 2012 Mistakes

A former Facebook vice president who lived through the company's 2012 IPO is calling Anthropic's planned public listing reckless, saying the AI company is on track to repeat the social network's mistakes. Brian Boland, who spent 11 years at Facebook and left in 2020, made the argument in an as-told-to essay published less than two weeks before Anthropic's planned IPO date.

Boland now advocates for progressive economics. He draws a straight line between Facebook's post-IPO drift and what he sees happening at Anthropic. Meta, which operates Facebook, declined to comment. Anthropic did not respond to requests for comment.

What did Facebook's 2012 IPO teach?

Boland recalls the lead-up to the listing as a period of celebration — interrupted by a crisis. Roughly two weeks before the IPO, General Motors' CMO publicly pulled all of his ad spend, saying he did not believe Facebook's ads worked. Since Facebook's entire business model rested on advertising, the market began asking whether the listing supported the facts.

The company scrambled to line up advertiser stories. The night before the IPO, employees held a hackathon on campus; one colleague brewed and bottled a beer he labeled the "IPO IPA."

The optimism, Boland says, masked a delusion. "There was a belief that nothing would change," he writes. "You believe your own rhetoric. And you believe the stories that you're telling each other, and you really believe that you're going to be completely different."

How the stock price took over

After going public, Facebook learned that equity compensation ties hiring to the share price. "Suddenly, the stock price that you said you didn't care about becomes a central feature of how you're going to grow the business," Boland says. When revenue growth became critical, Mark Zuckerberg mandated that every team with a product surface carry a revenue goal — alongside, and eventually instead of, growth and product goals.

The mission eroded as pressure built. "The secret trick of Silicon Valley is they use the mission to justify the rest," Boland argues. Teams measured product growth and revenue growth, not whether Facebook actually made the world more open and connected.

Why does Boland see history repeating at Anthropic?

Boland frames the Anthropic IPO as partly repetition, partly recklessness. "I've never seen an S-1 that devotes so much of its time talking about how dangerous its products could be," he writes.

His core concern is resource allocation. If attention, mindshare and hiring all flow to growth, he argues, the safety side gets neglected — and the teams meant to protect people from harm become "an afterthought and a distraction to the main goal of growth."

He also points to a contradiction: CEO Dario Amodei has said the company needs to slow down, and that even a year would buy the ability to build much safer products — at the same time the company is rushing to list this month. Facebook, Boland says, "grew revenue at the expense of safety. It chased the dollar rather than chasing protecting people."

What should Anthropic do instead?

Boland is not calling for Anthropic to stay private forever. "I'm not saying never go public, but I'm certainly saying not now," he writes. His conditions:

• Square away the safety side of the story, and slow down.
• Provide a much clearer financial picture, including the "circular nature of the economies" at play.
• Publish clear, audited, robust financials that everyone can understand.
• Offer a profitability picture markets can fairly price — and a risk profile that is not "so risky that they're uninsurable."

A delay, he argues, would also create space for disclosure of circular investments and balance-sheet debt. "The stakes are so high that there's no reason for us not to put these in place," he writes.

Boland stresses he is not anti-AI — he uses the tools daily and calls Anthropic "probably the best of the bunch." His closing warning is aimed at index-fund investors: "If things continue at the rate they are and eventually this stuff collapses, that hits every investor in the market."

By Olivia Hart