IPO

Wait, Watch, and Let Them Open the Books First

Anthropic filed to go public on June 1. OpenAI filed on June 8. Sam Altman went on television to insist there is no race. The rush is the tell.

There is a particular comedy in watching the CEO of one frontier lab file a confidential S-1 a week after his largest rival did the same, then appear on CNBC to explain that going public is merely "a financing event" and certainly not a race. SpaceX had already crossed the line on June 12. That was the largest IPO in history: around $75 billion raised at a valuation north of $1.7 trillion. So by the time Altman was denying the race, two of the three runners were already past the starting blocks and one had finished.

If you're a retail investor, an operator, or just someone trying to read the tea leaves on where AI is heading, the correct posture here is not enthusiasm. It's patience. Wait and watch. Here's why, and here's what actually moves when these things list.

The rush is the argument against the rush

For years, both companies said the same thing: we'll go public when it makes sense. Then, inside of eight days, both decided it made sense. When two organizations that spent years guarding their privacy suddenly sprint for the door at the same moment, the timing is rarely about the business being ready. It's about the window being open.

And the window is enormous. There's something like $8 trillion sitting in U.S. money-market funds, and almost no way for that capital to buy AI directly. You can buy Nvidia for the picks and shovels. You can buy Microsoft for its OpenAI stake or Alphabet for its DeepMind and Anthropic positions. What you cannot buy, until now, is a pure-play frontier lab. The first one to list captures that pent-up demand. That's the prize. Not capital for compute, which they raise privately at will, but first claim on a scarcity the IPO itself manufactures.

A law professor who studies IPOs put it plainly: everyone expected OpenAI to go first, so Anthropic filing first was a surprise. And there's a first-mover's advantage in being the company public investors price before they're exhausted. Read that again. The advantage being chased is narrative position, not fundamentals. That should make you slower, not faster.

You're being asked to buy a story you can't yet read

The entire point of staying private was not having to open the books. A confidential filing keeps it that way a while longer. So when someone tells you to get excited about these debuts, ask: excited about which numbers?

What we can see is not uniformly reassuring. OpenAI's run-rate revenue is extraordinary, roughly $30 billion annualized, and so are its losses. Internal projections reported by The Information put 2026 losses around $14 billion. Reuters reported the company burned $3.7 billion in a single quarter against $5.7 billion in revenue. Profitability isn't expected until the back half of the decade, and one bank's estimate suggests it may need north of $200 billion in additional funding by 2030. None of this is a scandal; it may be exactly what building this costs. But it's the kind of thing you want audited and explained in quarterly detail before you wire money.

Anthropic, to its credit, looks like the healthier business on paper: a reported $44 billion run-rate as of May, a sliver of operating profit expected in the second quarter, and the first month in which more businesses reportedly used it than OpenAI. But "looks healthier" is doing a lot of work in that sentence, because what we have is a press release and a confidential draft, not a segment-by-segment income statement. Even Deutsche Bank's analysts have noted that the economics of these businesses remain poorly understood. Wait for the parts you can't see.

History is unkind to the giants

Here's the uncomfortable pattern. Of the five largest IPOs in modern history, only Visa meaningfully beat the market afterward. Saudi Aramco listed near $1.7 trillion in 2019 and still trades below its issue price. Facebook fell 38% within six months of its debut. Size at listing is not a predictor of returns; if anything it's a mild warning, because a record valuation means the private market has already extracted most of the upside.

That's the real trap. By the time you can buy these, the private rounds have already carried the valuation from near-zero to near a trillion dollars. The thesis can be completely correct, since AI is almost certainly the future, and the entry price can still be wrong. The only question worth asking before chasing any of these debuts is the one nobody on a roadshow will pose: at what price does a correct thesis stop being a good investment?

What actually moves when they list

The "wait and watch" case isn't only self-protection. It's about reading the second-order effects, which are larger than the listings themselves.

The IPO market gets a flood and a squeeze. These three offerings could demand more than $200 billion from public markets. The entire U.S. IPO market raised about $45 billion in all of 2025. When institutions rebalance to make room for trillion-dollar names, they sell something else. So expect every other 2026 listing to feel the crowding, and expect a few good companies to get worse pricing for the simple crime of debuting in the same window as a frontier lab.

AI stocks get repriced against a real benchmark. Right now the market prices AI by proxy. Once two labs trade publicly, they become the benchmark, and a weak debut from any one of them forces a repricing conversation across the entire complex: Nvidia, the hyperscalers, every AI-adjacent name. Listing means the market can finally price AI directly instead of through intermediaries. That re-rating cuts both ways, and the first earnings miss will tell us which way.

The companies acquire a new master. A business losing $14 billion a year will now explain itself every 90 days to shareholders who want a path to profit. That discipline changes behavior: what gets funded, what gets cut, how much a company is willing to lose on frontier bets or, for a safety-focused lab, on safety itself. Public markets are not famously patient with "we lost money on purpose for the long-term good." Watch what that pressure does.

What waiting actually means

To be clear, "wait and watch" is not "AI is a bubble, run." It's narrower and more useful than that. It means: let the audited numbers arrive. Sit through the first two earnings calls. Watch what the lockups do, and more revealingly, watch what insiders do when their lockups expire. These stocks will trade for decades. There's no prize for being early to a position you can hold for twenty years, and there's a real penalty for paying the manufactured-scarcity premium on day one.

The line making the rounds is that 2026 will either be the most consequential IPO cycle since the dot-com era or the most expensive lesson in narrative-over-fundamentals the public markets have ever taught. Both endings are still on the table. You don't have to guess which one it is. You can just wait, and watch.

Figures via CNN, Reuters, Deutsche Bank Research, The Information, and KPMG reporting, June 2026. Confidential filings mean these numbers are press-reported, not yet audited, which is rather the point.