MARTA KHOMYN
Anthropic, developer of AI chatbot Claude, has filed its prospectus and is expected to go public on Wall Street in November at a valuation of up to US$2 trillion.
That would make it the highest-valued initial public offering (IPO) ever, ahead of SpaceX’s US$1.77 trillion listing in June. OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, is expected to follow next year.
While these AI-powered IPOs are massive, they reflect an ever bigger trend: holding AI risk is becoming unavoidable for most investors.
How much of your portfolio depends on how well AI does? If you invest in an S&P 500 index fund, the answer is about 44%.
In addition, most of the market’s gains right now come from AI. Just six companies – Apple, Microsoft, Meta and chipmakers Nvidia, Micron and AMD – delivered 57% of the S&P 500’s gains since April. Without them, the index would have risen about 4% rather than 10%.
For investors or even future retirees, that AI exposure is already in their portfolios and pension funds. For example, at the end of 2025 Australians held nearly A$1 trillion in US shares – through superannuation or pension funds, other managed funds, and their own investments.
Disclosure works when investors can price a risk and choose to avoid it. Neither is true here.
A catastrophic AI failure would affect societies worldwide. And as Anthropic warns in its filing documents, the legal risk is vast. Insurers may not be able to cover the potential liability.
In economic terms, AI safety is a public good. Each lab bears only a fraction of the cost of getting it wrong, but captures the rewards of moving fast.
In the absence of government-mandated AI safety standards, companies’ investments in safety will deliver negative returns. So with market incentives alone, AI models will likely remain less safe than socially optimal, especially with the arms-race incentives that dominate now.
That leaves governments. Clear rules – mandatory independent testing before powerful models are released, and clear liability when autonomous agents cause harm – would turn voluntary pledges into legal obligations.
And because the race to gain artificial general intelligence is being run between the US and China, not just between labs, those rules will need international agreement.
AI risks are here to stay — both in financial markets and at the societal level. And managing those risks will require both governments and the private sector to participate.