Billions in losses, no dividends: Inside the AI IPO frenzy

October 4, 2026 — 2:00am

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Depending on which expert you ask, there are a lot of ways to interpret the negative publicity that artificial intelligence companies and their CEOs have been facing over the past month.

Both OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, and Anthropic, the company behind Claude, are preparing to go public. Because of this, some sector and market commentators have questioned whether the increasingly dramatic warnings about superintelligence and the future of AI could also help generate investor interest and support the enormous private valuations attached to these businesses.

The Hugging Face scandal and unauthorised access to government systems, including a Services Australia Medicare statistics portal, as well as warnings from former Anthropic employee Jacob Coxon that those developing AI believed the technology “could kill us all by the end of this decade”, however, are being seen by others as genuine roadblocks that could impact their IPO plans.

Importantly, the Medicare incident did not involve access to individual Australians’ Medicare records, but rather non-public aggregate information and internal files. Whatever the case, both companies still remain on track to eventually list on the open market, and the number of people interested in investing in these companies remains extraordinarily high. So if you’re considering investing in either or both of these companies when the IPOs do eventually happen, there are a few important things you need to know and consider before then.

When Anthropic filed its paperwork with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, a requirement before being able to go public, on June 1, it came on the back of a $US965 billion valuation and a fresh funding round where it secured $US65 billion. Market experts initially predicted an IPO would follow in October, but Bloomberg reported this week that the date would now more likely be mid-November, and Reuters has reported that the company is seeking a valuation of more than $US2 trillion.

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