AI IPO Season Is Here. The Dot-Com Echoes Are Getting Louder.

EBM Markets Analysis — By Nick Staunton, Editor-in-Chief

London markets opened higher on Tuesday as oil prices eased back and bargain hunters moved into positions built up during recent sessions. There is no concrete breakthrough to point to in Middle East negotiations, but the mood across trading floors is broadly optimistic — investors appear to believe a longer-term resolution is coming, even as Russia’s devastating attacks on Ukraine continue to register barely a flicker on the sentiment dial. Geopolitics, it seems, has been temporarily outbid by artificial intelligence.

And this week, AI has a new headline act.

Anthropic Files for Its IPO — and the Queue Is Forming

Anthropic has filed paperwork for a public listing later this year, joining a pipeline of landmark AI flotations that is reshaping how markets think about technology valuations. As we reported in our analysis of Anthropic’s $65 billion Series H and its path to a $965 billion valuation, the company has spent the past eighteen months building the most credible enterprise AI business outside of the hyperscalers themselves. The IPO filing is a logical next step — and the timing is deliberate.

The AI enthusiasm washing through global markets right now is at its most intense since the sector began its current run. Anthropic’s leadership clearly wants to capitalise on that window before sentiment shifts. It follows SpaceX’s filing — as we covered in our analysis of why investors are racing to get exposure to SpaceX ahead of its listing — and market expectations are building that OpenAI will follow both of them into the public markets before year-end.

What makes Anthropic’s listing potentially distinctive is the nature of its investor base. Its Claude models have built a strong reputation specifically among enterprises focused on reliability, regulatory compliance and data security — precisely the segments that write the largest, most durable software contracts. Backing from Amazon and Google provides access to compute resources and distribution channels that most AI startups can only dream of. Combined with growing enterprise adoption, that positions Anthropic as one of the more defensible businesses in the AI stack — not simply a model provider, but an infrastructure play with recurring commercial relationships underneath it.

The Bubble Question Nobody Wants to Ask Out Loud

The accumulation of landmark AI listings — SpaceX, Anthropic, OpenAI — is set to intensify excitement across markets. It will also, inevitably, intensify the question that experienced investors are already asking privately: are we approaching bubble territory?

The honest answer is that the parallels with the dot-com era are real enough to take seriously, even if the underlying businesses are considerably more robust. The dot-com boom was characterised by soaring optimism around internet technology pushing valuations to levels that bore no relationship to revenue, let alone profit. Funding conditions eventually tightened, confidence collapsed and an enormous amount of capital was destroyed.

Today’s AI leaders are structurally different businesses. As we explored in our analysis of Alphabet’s $80 billion equity raise and what it signals about the AI infrastructure buildout, the largest AI companies are generating real revenue at remarkable scale — Google Cloud growing 63% year-on-year, Anthropic crossing $47 billion in annualised revenue, enterprise adoption accelerating across every major sector. These are not speculative businesses built on projections and PowerPoint decks.

But high valuations and strong businesses are not mutually exclusive with bubble dynamics. The mechanism by which dot-com optimism ultimately became dangerous was not that the underlying technology was wrong — the internet did reshape the global economy, just as its proponents predicted — but that valuations had run so far ahead of near-term fundamentals that any disappointment triggered a cascade of reassessment.

The Retail Investor Risk

There is a specific risk embedded in this IPO cycle that deserves direct attention. By the time Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI eventually float, an enormous share of the value creation will already have been captured by early private investors — venture capital, sovereign wealth funds, strategic partners who got in at single-digit or double-digit billion valuations. As we reported in our coverage of how private investors are racing to get SpaceX exposure before the IPO, the secondary market for pre-IPO stakes has been extraordinarily active precisely because sophisticated capital understands this dynamic.

Retail investors, by contrast, typically arrive at the IPO price or above — after the most explosive phase of value creation has already occurred. This does not mean the investments are bad. Amazon survived the dot-com crash and went on to become one of the most valuable companies in history. But it does mean the risk-reward calculation at IPO is materially different from the risk-reward calculation that early investors faced.

According to Bloomberg, the pipeline of AI listings expected before year-end represents the most significant technology IPO cycle since 2021 — and possibly since the original dot-com era. The question for investors is not whether to have exposure to AI — that argument is largely settled — but at what price, through which vehicle and with what degree of diversification across the stack.

The Rules Are Evolving Too Fast to Be Certain

The final complexity in this market moment is one that even the most sophisticated investors acknowledge openly: the AI race is moving so quickly that some of tomorrow’s most significant winners may not yet be visible. The competitive landscape that looks settled today — with Anthropic, OpenAI and the hyperscalers appearing to divide the enterprise market between them — could look materially different in three years.

As we noted in our analysis of how European business schools are redefining executive education in response to AI’s acceleration, the bottleneck in the AI economy is not technology — it is the capacity of institutions, regulators and investors to keep pace with what the technology is doing. That uncertainty cuts both ways. It is a risk for investors who overpay at IPO on assumptions that may not hold. It is also an opportunity for those who remain selective, diversified and realistic about the difference between a great technology and a great investment at a great price.

The AI listings are coming. The excitement is warranted. The discipline required to navigate it is the part that gets harder, not easier, the more excited the market becomes.

Related Analysis

Anthropic’s $65bn Series H Puts It Ahead of OpenAI — and on the Doorstep of a $1 Trillion Valuation — The commercial and financial context behind Anthropic’s IPO filing and what the $965 billion private valuation means for public market expectations.

Investors Race to Get Exposure to SpaceX Ahead of IPO — How the secondary market for pre-IPO AI stakes is capturing value before retail investors can access it — and what it means for the listing itself.

Alphabet Raises $80bn for AI — and Buffett Just Backed It With $10bn — The infrastructure investment cycle driving the AI valuations that the Anthropic and SpaceX IPOs are now seeking to crystallise.