OpenAI and Anthropic are both preparing to go public, and the order in which they reach the stock market could materially affect their futures and the next phase of the artificial-intelligence investment boom, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis published Sunday. The two AI heavyweights are competing not only on technology but also for investor capital in a market where timing carries outsized weight.
The IPO window is wide open. Cerebras, an AI-chip company, rose 68% on its first day of trading in its recent listing. Elon Musk’s SpaceX plans to follow this summer in what may be the largest IPO in history, with a targeted valuation of $1.5 trillion.
Those offerings will consume significant investor capital before either AI-model developer reaches the market.
Both companies are targeting sky-high valuations. Anthropic raised money recently at a valuation approaching $1 trillion. OpenAI was last valued at $852 billion in March.
“There’s only so much oxygen in the room,” Patrick Healy, founder of Issuer Network, a firm that advises companies going public on leading U.S. exchanges, told the Journal. “SpaceX is going to consume an absolute ton of capital, and the guy that goes second is going to have a better position than the guy that goes third.”
Academic research supports the urgency. Studies have shown that IPOs tend to come in industry clusters and that companies listing later in a cycle tend to perform less well than earlier entrants, according to the Journal. The reasoning is that higher-quality companies with stronger competitive positions typically go public first, triggering a wave of followers that may not be as strong.
The dynamic played out in 2019 when ride-hailing rivals Lyft and Uber Technologies went public. Lyft, the smaller of the two, was first to list with an IPO that fell short of its hype. A post-IPO decline in Lyft’s stock directly affected Uber’s listing two months later. Uber cut its target valuation, and its shares still fell after their debut, even in a market where other tech listings had been performing well.
Even when the market’s initial verdict is negative, first movers can still benefit from being public. Facebook’s stock lost more than half its value in its first three months of trading in 2012, but later went on a sustained upward run. Other companies that had been waiting to list, notably Twitter, were forced to hold off. The early listing allowed Facebook to raise capital and give employees a path to cash out while the stock recovered.
OpenAI has been working with bankers to file initial IPO paperwork and could do so shortly, according to the Journal. Anthropic’s timeline is less clear.
Which company reaches the market first — and how investors respond — could shape the trajectory of both firms and signal whether public markets view the AI boom as transformative or overextended.