The AI IPOs
9 bull · 10 bear · 3 neutral · exact words, dated and sourced
+12OpenAI, Anthropic, and the trillion-dollar listing question: when they go public, at what price, and who is buying.
The count, last 30 days: 9 bull, 10 bear. The tape leans bear. A count, not a verdict.
The tape
Jul 06
Jul 13
Jul 20
bullbearclaims filed per week
What the people who move markets are saying about this, in their own words. These are views on the record, not scored bets: when a call here grows a number and a deadline, it moves to the scoreboard. Newest first.
Bull
Direct answer to the anchor's challenge 'why are we valuing anthropic at nearly a trillion dollars? What's the moat?' @21:07; he cites first-party products ('cloud code, cloud co-work... cloud tag' - whisper for Claude Code/Cowork/Tag) @21:32, calls Kimi 'competitive with, I'd say, one generation prior' @22:01, and flags 'significant new releases coming out' from the labs @22:08.
“I think both anthropic and open AI have multiple moats. The first is they have very significant revenues. These are the fastest growing companies in human history.”
Bear
Reasoning: Moonshot's Kimi K3 'outstrips most of the frontier models on many parameters, except for the two leading ones from anthropic and open AI' @0:46, and cheap open-source Chinese models mean 'there may be some pricing pressure on what they're able to charge their customers' @1:39.
“as we see open AI and anthropic try to go public in the near future, both of them want to get valuations that are above a trillion dollars each. That may be a little bit more challenging today.”
Bear
His formal prediction of the episode, teased in the cold open at 0:25 (duplicate of this in-context occurrence). Full mechanism @35:01: OpenAI acquires Sierra and installs Brett Taylor as their CEO and kicks Altman up to chairman; timeframe restated @35:11: I would say it's six months. You know, it might be 12 but Sam Altman is on the green mile. Repeated as his prediction in the week-ahead segment @64:06.
“We're gonna have a new CEO at OpenAI within the next six months.”
Bull
Anthropic is reportedly scheduling investor meetings for a listing as soon as October (@8:04, @16:29: Supposedly that listing's gonna come in October, which is very soon), while OpenAI is tabling theirs, and DeepSeek is preparing its own IPO. Ed reframes the race: Now the question is, will DeepSeek get out before open AI? @17:27. Kalsi is whisper's rendering of Kalshi.
“It's clear that Anthropic is going to win that race. In fact, if we look on Kalsi, the odds that they will announce an IPO before 2027 are up to 74%.”
Bull
Sacks relays Gavin Baker's view while arguing Anthropic is 'one of the biggest of the big tech companies' with a trillion-dollar mark today and the leading AI company by revenue.
“Gavin Baker thinks it'll be at three trillion after the IPO.”
Bull
Chamath argues AI-native operators + capital (Stripe/Advent/Block for PayPal, Ryan Cohen/eBay, Bending Spoons rollups) will revive 'flaccid' founder-less digital businesses; he expects a big wave of such mega deals over the next couple years.
“I will make a prediction. I think that eBay and PayPal are probably the beginning of a wave of mega deals”
Bull
Citing Ryan Cohen's eBay bid and Josh Kushner/General Catalyst accounting rollups, Freeberg argues AI-native operators will keep acquiring mature, founder-less, over-spending digital businesses to revive them with AI.
“I think there's going to be more of these kinds of deals.”
Bear
Pushing back on people who 'extrapolate anthropics ARR' from three straight ~10x years to 'a trillion dollar' figure @13:47; sees ~$200B ARR next year as plausible but the 10x era ending as competition and Jevons-paradox commoditization arrive: 'the model providers are going to have an uphill battle from here compared to the last two years.' @22:32.
“I don't think they're going to get to those numbers. Do I think they could get to 200 next year? Yeah, well, that's a doubling. That's not 10 times.”
Bear
Referring to the big private names heading to market: 'if they're trading at 20 to 70 times revenue uh when by comparison google went public at eight and a half times revenue' @22:20. Oxbow skipped the SpaceX IPO, which he says is already 'down 16 from where it closed uh after the first day of trading' @7:29; his table shows hot IPOs usually get cheaper within a year.
“these seem more like all of the optimism and the best case scenarios are priced in which we understand all the enthusiasm around the ai trade but that doesn't leave a lot of upside left”
Bull
'we're likely going to see in pickup and distributions on the buyout side... and a massive pickup in distributions within VC and growth because... about 70% of IPO activity is usually VC backed' @29:08-29:25, for an industry 'starved of distributions over the past 10 years' @29:30. She also argues 'private equity is a bigger representation of the real economy than the public markets are' so any AI productivity boost accrues to PE @28:14-28:27.
“2026 is actually on pace to be the largest year in terms of capital market activity that we've seen over the past 10 years and could even be what we saw in 2021.”
Neutral
On Apple's trade-secrets suit against OpenAI and the ~40 post-phone device designs he says Qualcomm is helping competitors build: 'Any way they can stall someone that might be a competitor to theirs, obviously, they're not beyond litigation.' (@6:29)
“you don't sue someone you're not worried about”
Bear
Her own editorial read on the Apple trade-secret suit; asserts on tape OpenAI is actively looking to go public
“For Altman, though, this is the latest distraction. It is a headwind at a time when this company is looking to go public, guys.”
Neutral
ADVICE TO THE LABS, not investor sell advice: IPO now, 'at a huge price', before the token-cost reckoning he describes becomes visible; his own CTO's numbers (costs doubling every 45 days, ~5% productivity gain) are the setup
“So I suspect that if you can get out now, you should get out now before all of that starts to seep into the water table.”
Bull
Stated house position; he is an investor in both labs
“altimeter would be a buyer at scale and that size in both of those IPOs at three trillion.”
Bull
On an OpenAI IPO above $1 trillion
“So can they get out at over a trillion on that type of revenue growth being one of the two frontier premier labs? I think the answer to that is yes.”
Bear
Reaffirming his January call that OpenAI runs out of money within 18 months
“Yeah, I do hold to my prediction. Back in January, the burn rate was just crazy.”
Bear
On OpenAI's five-year internal burn projection
“And even though Sam Altman is a magician, when it comes to raising money, he wasn't going to be raising $660 billion, which is what the internally projected burn rate was for the next five years”
Bear
On the $122B raise: about two-thirds was conditional promises or payment in kind, he says
“the actual real money was a small share of the total fundraise, which raises the question, why announce this massive 122 billion headline number? When anyone who digs into it can see it's rubbish?”
Bear
On OpenAI's IPO delay to 2027; invokes the WeWork 2019 precedent
“if it tries to do the IPO, it may not succeed and then it's really cooked.”
Bull
Contrasting with OpenAI
“I think Anthropic has been way more laser focused on the part of the market that makes sense, which is the enterprise part, and just better managed.”
Bear
His sharpened call: an OpenAI bubble, not a general AI bubble; possible buyers he names: Amazon, Microsoft
“I'm just saying there's a 50% chance that by next summer we'll find they couldn't really go public in the private markets, they can't raise enough money, and they have to sell themselves at some sort of discount to another company.”
Neutral
Gerstner cites Reuters reporting 'that OpenAI may be planning to go public late twenty six or twenty seven' at a rumored ~$1T. Altman denies any date or decision ('We don't have like a date in mind... We don't have a decision to do this'), while conceding an eventual IPO is where things go; he later says retail access is 'probably the single most appealing thing about it to me.'
“No, no, no. We don't we don't have anything that specific. I'm a realist. I assume it will happen someday. But that was I don't know why people write these reports.”
On the scoreboard
Voices in this debate who also have scored calls on the ledger.
Head to head
Pick any two voices in this debate; their freshest claims go side by side.
Follow The AI IPOs
One short email when this debate moves: new calls, reversals, verdicts. Plain words, free.
Before you trust the call, check the record.
We write down what public figures predict, in their exact words, and check the result when the deadline arrives. Every line links to its source. How we score · Corrections · The scoreboard
© 2026 Pundit Rumble · independent and unaffiliated · updated every market morning · not investment advice.
We write down what public figures predict, in their exact words, and check the result when the deadline arrives. Every line links to its source. How we score · Corrections · The scoreboard
© 2026 Pundit Rumble · independent and unaffiliated · updated every market morning · not investment advice.