WTF is going on at Anthropic?!

The fake crash headline — and the real bombshell

Berman opens with a dramatic feint: Anthropic “lost $200 billion” off its private valuation in hours — then immediately reveals the twist. It wasn’t the AI bubble popping; it was Anthropic’s lawyers warning that a bunch of secondary-share transactions people thought they were buying into may be invalid.

Why Anthropic stock became catnip in the first place

He frames Anthropic as maybe the fastest-growing private company ever, with a private valuation he says went from around $300 billion in February to above $1 trillion. The fuel for that frenzy was Dario Amodei saying revenue grew 80x this year, which Berman calls “absolutely unheard of,” and it’s why he personally regretted passing on a chance to buy secondary shares — until now.

The SPV daisy chain that turned hot stock into a black box

Berman walks through the mechanics with a simple story: an early Anthropic employee wants liquidity to buy a house, sells shares, a buyer bundles multiple employees’ shares, and then wraps them in an SPV. That SPV gets sold into more SPVs, each layer taking fees — what might start around 2% can balloon toward 10% or more — while the final buyer has almost no idea what rights, approvals, or terms actually sit underneath.

Anthropic’s lawyers basically said: if we didn’t approve it, it’s worthless

This is the core legal point of the video. Anthropic says any stock sale or transfer not approved by its board is void, and Berman highlights the especially brutal line: Anthropic does not permit SPVs to acquire its stock, so transfers into those structures are void under its bylaws.

The company even spelled out the scam signals and named names

Berman reads through Anthropic’s red flags: unsolicited outreach, fake exclusivity, crypto or wire-payment requests, pressure tactics, and no documentation showing board approval. He lingers on that last one because the deals he saw offered “basically give zero visibility,” then notes Anthropic specifically flagged Open Door Partners, Unicorns Exchange, Pachamama, Lionheart Ventures, Hive, Forge, Sidecar, and UpMarket.

A Twitter flex, a deleted post, and the FINRA problem

Things get messier when he points to investor Ash Arora posting — then deleting — that brokering one Anthropic secondary deal made her more than her entire net worth from her 20s. Berman says he even DM’d asking for shares, but the bigger point is the chaos: if you’re not a registered broker, publicly brokering deals like that can trigger serious legal trouble, which is why he says people were talking about FINRA and “you will go to jail if you do this.”

The bigger argument: AI wealth is being created behind a velvet rope

Berman ends on the fairness question. Anthropic reportedly let 600 employees sell $6.6 billion in shares, creating a wave of new millionaires, while retail investors are locked out of Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI entirely — a setup he says reinforces the “rich get richer” dynamic around AI.

From private-market scarcity to San Francisco house prices

He ties the story back to real-world effects, arguing that private liquidity events are already spilling into local markets. His example: a San Francisco Sunset District home that sold for $900,000 over asking, nearly 90% above list, which he sees as one visible consequence of a small insider class capturing enormous AI gains while everyone else watches from the outside.