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What Will These IPOs Do To The Stock Market?
00:22:02
Anthropic confidentially filed for an IPO that could come as soon as this fall, joining SpaceX and OpenAI in a $4T listing parade. Anthropic expands Mythos access to 15+ countries, Alphabet raises $80B for AI spending, and mathematicians publish a warning declaration on AI.
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Welcome to the Tech Brew Ride home for Tuesday, June 2, 2026. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, more details on that anthropic IPO filing joining SpaceX and OpenAI in the coming $4 trillion IPO parade. What would that mean for the stock market? Anthropic expands Mythos access to more than 15 countries, Alphabet raises $80 billion for AI spending, and mathematicians publish a warning about AI here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Today's episode is brought to you by Doppel Social engineering attacks don't bother to knock. They slip right into your inbox phone or on websites, instead pretending to be a harmless internal email or a normal text message until it's too late. Doppl sees right through this disguise. Their AI native platform trains your team to recognize threats like deepfakes, bad links and impersonation attempts before they can actually cause any damage. Doppel strengthens team resilience by giving employees the tools and defenses they need to protect themselves from increasingly sophisticated social engineering threats. It's kind of like having a security team that has eyes everywhere, and their digital risk protection takes it one step further by keeping an eye on every channel to connect patterns and shut them down fast. Invest in social engineering defense. Learn more at D o p e l.com that's d o p e l.com okay anthropic IPO filing details quoting the Journal Banks have told both Anthropic and OpenAI that whoever makes it to market first will get to define the new industry and have first dibs on the large pools of cash eager to back new AI companies. If both file initial paperwork with regulators around the same time, either would still have a chance to stage an offering before the other. Anthropic said in a blog post that its plans will depend on market conditions and other factors. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a CNBC appearance Monday that he didn't think there was a race to go public. We will do it when it makes sense, he said. The year could end up being the biggest ever for money raised through IPOs if Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceX all make their debuts. SpaceX is aiming to raise as much as $80 billion or more in an offering next week. It had a valuation of $1.25 trillion after its combination with Musk's AI company Xai, and could see its valuation rise further because Anthropic filed confidentially. As is customary these days, most investors will have to wait until closer to the IPO to see details of the company' including its finances. The confidential process allows regulators and companies to engage in a back and forth dialogue about disclosures as they finalize the so called prospectus for the stock offering. End quote. But let's come back to this whole blockbuster IPO parade, The economist says SpaceX's Anthropics and OpenAI's IPOs could combined add up to $4 trillion in US stock market value added to the stock market within weeks of each other coming within months from what would be the knock on effect of that how on earth will the stock market handle this? Headlines predict a trading frenzy Steve Sosnick, chief strategist at Interactive Brokers, one of the world's biggest online trading platforms, has warned of the existential risk the listings pose. A particular worry is that compilers of stock market indices will grant the gigantic trio fast track entry into their benchmarks. That would prompt tracker funds with trillions of dollars in assets to buy the newly minted shares days after they are issue. After exhausting a big pool of buyers straight away. Who will be left? The answer is lots of investors in an extraordinarily deep and liquid market, unprecedented as the serving of supersized IPOs is. America's extraordinary stock market will gulp it down. In the years to follow, though, expect some indigestion. First, put the Giga IPO's size in context in nominal terms. The current record for capital raised by a debut listing is held by Saudi aramco, which in 2019 garnered $29 billion when it fl loaded in Riyadh. SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI are collectively targeting a $200 billion odd raise. Yet this is a rounding error in America's stock market. Firms in the broad Russell 3000 index share have a total market value of $79 trillion. Those in the narrower but still more widely tracked S&P 500 index of big companies are worth around 69 trillion. As a consequence, investors and index funds will not immediately see their portfolios change much. Although Nasdaq has already shortened the seasoning period before index inclusion to 15 trading days and FTSE Russell has slashed its waiting time to five days. And S and P Dow Jones is reportedly considering something similar. Most share indices weight firms in proportion to the value only of shares they have released for public trading. The so called free float. For SpaceX, this means just the $75 billion or so of stock it intends issue in June, so its initial weight in the S and P will be around 0.1%. The Nasdaq 100 is an exception and has changed its rules to weight companies at up to three times their free float in an apparent effort to woo Mr. Musk. Even so, SpaceX's probable initial weight in this $40 trillion index will still only be around 0.51%. But this will change as more shares are released for trading. All but one of America's listed tech giants have free floats above 85. The lowest is that of Meta, which went public in 2012 and has a 13% share of its shares still owned by Mark Zuckerberg, its founder at first lockup. Provisions in the IPO prospectuses of SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI will prevent company insiders and early investors from selling their existing stakes and raising the free float. Over time, however, these will expire and trillions of dollars worth of new shares will come to market. SpaceX plans to release its locked up shares in a series of tranches if its IPO $75 billion worth of shares, valuing the firm at a hoped for $1.75 trillion, the initial free float will be 4%. None of Mr. Musk's stake, which accounts for about half of the remainder, can be sold for 366 days after the IPO. This restriction also applies to some shares held by certain significant investors. Lockups on the rest, representing a little under half of SpaceX's value, will expire more quickly after its first quarterly report, probably in August or September. Insiders can sell 20% of their they can offload another 10% if the shares are then trading 30% or more above their IPO price. Extra tranches are due for release on set dates after the IPO and after the second quarterly earnings report. Insiders do not have to sell their shares, of course. Mr. Musk in particular, may hold onto his most of which carry outsized voting rights and so cement his control of SpaceX. Similar considerations will apply to shareholders in Anthropic and OpenAI after the labs flotations. So the additional addition of those firms to public markets will unfold over years rather than days. But gradual does not mean inconsequential. If history is a guide, those who buy the resulting shares stand a good chance of disappointment. Jay Ritter of the University of Florida has studied the post IPO returns of stocks listed between 1980 and 2024. The average such stock returned 20 percentage points less than the broader market over the three years after its first trading day. Firms valued at over 40 times their revenue underperformed by 58 percentage points. SpaceX, with a valuation of 1.75 trillion would begin trading at over 90 times its revenue. Blockbuster IPOs are also often taken as a sign that a bull market is nearing its peak, understandably, since firms want to sell shares for top dollar. The last surge in listings in 2020 and 2021 came just before a bear market. Previous IPO booms, for instance, in the late 1990s or the years before 2008 were followed by far bigger slumps today. If the giga trio underperforms, it may even precipitate a correction. All three firms are closely associated with progress in AI, and so too increasingly, is the wider market. America's 10 biggest listed AI related firms already account for two fifths of the S&P 500's value. Bad news for SpaceX alone might not harm a tracker fund much, but bad news for AI certainly would. Funds that weight each of an index's component's stocks equally rather than by market value offer some protection from this, but they also amount to betting against the market, the opposite of passive investing. AI is uncharted territory, and many leaders are trying to navigate through without a guide to help them. That's why Morning Brew created the Intelligence Shift, a new podcast with PwC, all about how AI is fundamentally changing different industries. Host Dan Priest sits down with people who work with AI on a daily basis. Together, they discuss real stories, real strategies and real takeaways for leaders. Get guidance from industry experts. Listen to the Intelligence Shift wherever you get your podcast. More Anthropic News Anthropic says it will extend Project Glasswing to organizations in more than 15 countries, sources say, giving mythos access to Five Eyes, NATO, SAM, Samsung, SK and others. Quoting the FT New countries to be granted access to Mythos include countries in the Five Eyes intelligence alliance, such as Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Other nations include France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Spain, Belgium, Sweden, India, Japan and South Korea, according to a person familiar with the matter. Companies that can access Mythos as part of the expansion include US Tech group Okta and South Korean companies Samsung, sk, Hynix and SK Telecom. NATO, the US led military military alliance headquartered in Brussels has also been given access, along with the EU's cybersecurity agency ANISA, according to people familiar with the matter. Anthropic launched Claude Methos Preview in April but initially limited access to a group of about 50 largely U.S. companies, citing the AI model's advanced coding capabilities and the potential for it to be used for hacking. The company has also worked closely with the US Government on the rollout with Trump administration officials examining its apparent ability to identify cybersecurity flaws and exploits in IT systems. The model's release sparked anxiety among non US Groups such as banks, regulators and governments across the world, which lobbied for access to Mythos or briefings on what Anthropic had found. Since the initial launch of mythos, rival OpenAI has launched its GPT 5.5 model, which has similar capabilities and has been rolled out to a larger group of trusted partners. Cybersecurity experts have suggested that other frontier models will also soon catch up. Anthropic said new organizations to be given Mythos provide critical infrastructure covering financial services, cybersecurity and technology. But the company added that the new members of Project Glasswing covered several industries that weren't as well represented in our initial cohort, such as power, water, healthcare, communications and hardware. Without providing names, Anthropic said its new partners included companies or nonprofits that maintain code bases that are relied upon by lots of other organizations around the world, including governments. What each partner has in common is that a successful attack on their code base could be catastrophic, it said, estimating that for most partners a major attack could affect more than 100 million people, with important ramifications for both global and national security. End quote. Alphabet is raising $80 billion through equity offerings, including a $10 billion investment deal with Berkshire to fund AI spending in one of the largest equity deals ever, quoting Bloomberg. The undertaking includes a $40 billion so called at the market program, which would involve the company selling shares directly into the open market from time to time beginning in the third quarter, according to a statement Monday. The company will also offer $30 billion in underwritten offerings of shares and mandatory convertible preferred stock, as well as the $10 billion deal with Berkshire Hathaway. Together, the transactions represent one of the largest equity deals of all time, and they bring an unexpected twist to a blockbuster year for initial public offerings. It's rare for a large public company to raise this much equity, but the economics of the AI business have pushed Google and its peers to get creative. The company has embarked on an unprecedented spending spree to build the infrastructure that it needs to develop cutting edge artificial intelligence models and meet demand from customers who want to buy its chips to fulfill their own AI ambitions. Google is trying to capitalize on a growing appetite for its homegrown AI chips, known as tensor processing units, or TPUs. They have become a key alternative to Nvidia's market leading processors in an industry that requires tremendous amounts of computing power. AI is driving an expansionary moment for Alphabet the company said in the statement. By scaling its investments, the company seeks to expand its foundational infrastructure to support the significant growth opportunity ahead. Chief Financial Officer Anat Ashkenazi said in April that the company's capital expenditures in 2027 will be significantly higher than the up to $190 billion it budgeted for 2026, a level that would already be more than double last year's total. That level of spending would exceed even Alphabet's operating cash flow, Singh said. In addition to financing Alphabet's capital expenditures, the new transactions potentially pull money away from the offerings of Alphabet rivals such as SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI, which are all set to go public this year. There's only so much capital you can allocate even in the public markets, singh said. He added that if investors allocate their capital to TPUs because they find that to be an attractive area because of Google's growth prospects, then that does hurt the new IPOs, even though they are very fast growing companies. Alphabet is also taking advantage of its recent stock rally. It is now the second most valuable company in the world behind Nvidia. Microsoft and Meta depend on Nvidia for the AI chips powering their data centers, whereas Google has its own chips, singh said in an interview. In the case of Alphabet, that's the unique value proposition they have that they don't have to rely on Nvidia End quote. Finally today, 16 mathematicians have published what they are calling the Leiden Declaration on AI and Mathematics to warn of potential threats to the field, such as around accuracy and reliability. Quoting the Times recently, there are signs that some branches of higher mathematics, among the most rarefied realms of human achievement, are vulnerable to a shakeup by artificial intelligence. Mathematicians in turn, have been thinking about how to respond. On Tuesday, a group of 16 mathematicians, in consultation with colleagues and math organizations worldwide, published the Leiden Declaration on Artificial Intelligence and Mathematics. It aims to frame the conversation about future directions, said Dame Ursula Martin of the authors and a mathematician and computer scientist at Oxford. This effort comes as AI models have been making headlines with successful results in research level mathematics. In late May, OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, announced that one of its models had disproved a notable 80 year old mathematics conjecture in the field of combinatorial geometry. The conjecture is one of some 1200 problems posed by the Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdos. While while some of these Erdos problems are considered throwaway questions of narrow interest, others have proved influential and field shaping. Along with a research paper Describing the proof, OpenAI released a companion paper by several independent mathematicians. Jakob Tisrman of the University of Toronto, an expert in the adjacent subfield of number theory, commented, this is a really impressive piece of work and I would accept it for any journal without hesitation. Other figures in the field were less sanguine. Melanie Matchett Wood, a Harvard mathematician, was enthusiastic but raised concerns. For instance, she commented that the OpenAI paper did not appropriately reference a history of closely related ideas in the literature. It's a powerful tool and I think it will be a great tool to accelerate mathematics research, Dr. Matchett Wood said in an interview. But she noted that the community needs to figure out how to use AI in a way that will maintain human understanding of the mathematics. Perhaps most pointedly, the authors raised the question of Whether the many AI companies tackling mathematics major players such as OpenAI, Google, DeepMind and Anthropic, or startups such as Harmonic Math Inc. And Axiom Math are keeping the field's best interests in mind. Technology companies involvement in research, they write, raises the risk that research questions are prioritized and incentivized because of their amenability to AI methods and models rather than their deeper significance to understanding. In turn, they point out, this disadvantages researchers who choose not to use the technology and those who do not have access to it. End quote. Microsoft Build is going on right now as I say these words, so I'm sure we're going to have a bunch of headlines from that, but that will be tomorrow. Talk to you then.