AI giant Anthropic has fired the starting gun on a mammoth US stock market debut, edging ahead of rival OpenAI, but the sector's race to go public has 'clear echoes' of the dot.com boom and bust, an expert has warned.
The firm behind the Claude chatbot revealed on Monday it had filed paperwork with the US Securities and Exchange Commission for an expected initial public offering (IPO) on Wall Street later this year. The move marks the latest step in its meteoric rise from research laboratory to a company valued at nearly $1.0 trillion (£740 billion). It is widely expected to be followed soon after by close competitor OpenAI, as firms in the fast-growing sector look to capitalise on the boom in investor demand for artificial intelligence (AI).
Google's parent, Alphabet, also said on Monday it was looking to raise $80 billion (£59.4 billion) in equity to fund its AI infrastructure investments – its first stock offering in more than 20 years and one of the largest ever equity raisings. Elon Musk's rocket and AI company SpaceX has already recently announced plans to list on the Nasdaq stock exchange in the US.
But experts cautioned that the wave of investor enthusiasm for AI investments and rush to raise cash in public markets raised fears of a growing bubble in the tech sector. Susannah Streeter, chief investment strategist at the Wealth Club, said: 'The listings are set to intensify excitement around AI, but they may also fuel concerns that parts of the market may be entering bubble territory.' She added: 'There are clear echoes of the dot.com era, when soaring optimism around the internet pushed technology stocks to dizzying heights before confidence collapsed as funding conditions tightened.'
However, Streeter said AI companies were generally stronger than the highly speculative companies of the dot.com boom. 'Firms such as Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI are building ecosystems around AI, data infrastructure and computer power which could shape the global economy for decades,' she said. Nicholas Hyett, lead alternatives analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown, said the fund-raising announcements by Anthropic and Alphabet also 'represent a major volte-face for the giants of US tech, which used to pride themselves on capital light operating models that spat out cash rather than gobbling it up'.
