Columnist Jamie Hose explores how the decision made by AI giants in filing IPOs may make waves for the wider sector to navigate
By, Jamie Hose
In recent weeks, OpenAI and Anthropic both filed confidentially to go public on the US stock market.
The announcements that each organisation had submitted draft S-1 registration statements with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) occurred within days of each other, highlighting the intense competition at the heart of the AI race.
Each a giant in the field of developing advanced AI tools in its own right, starting down the path to becoming a publicly traded company marks a major milestone in their respective success stories.
Founded as a non-profit research lab in 2015, OpenAI experienced a meteoric rise to prominence over the past decade, capturing headlines since it released ChatGPT in 2022 and converted to a for-profit structure.
Younger by around six years, Anthropic was created by a group of former OpenAI employees and launched its own AI agent, Claude, in 2023. Despite its later start, Anthropic’s latest valuation shows it has outsprinted OpenAI to become the world’s most valuable AI startup, in addition to being the first of the two to file for initial public offering.
Signalling AI is more than just a tool
The direction of movement from both rivals suggests AI is no longer being treated simply as a useful digital tool, but increasingly as a new form of economic infrastructure for future business, according to Assistant Professor Yu Zhang at UCD Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School.
“Both OpenAI and Anthropic are still making losses, so this is not a traditional IPO story about mature, profitable companies entering public markets. It is a bet that today’s losses will eventually be justified by future scale.”
She also highlights a broader capital-market issue. Private markets have already been funding leading AI companies at close to public market scale. As these two AI giants each file for IPO, it could be an indication that frontier AI has become too large, risky, and capital-hungry to remain comfortably within the private sphere.
“The move is therefore double-edged. On the one hand, it confirms that AI tools are now seen as central to future business value. On the other hand, the scale of capital involved, combined with the fact that these technologies are currently moving faster than regulatory frameworks can adapt, is likely to intensify calls for stricter regulation.”
While public listing entails a greater level of financial disclosure, this is not the same as effective oversight, Zhang explains. As AI adoption becomes ever more widespread, it is likely that regulators will face increased pressure to set clearer rules to preserve users’ safety and accountability.
Preparing for shifts in the labour market
Ripples are also being felt across the labour market, says Professor Florian Stahl at Mannheim Business School, as increasingly AI-literate generations enter the workforce.
“The critical question is no longer whether graduates will use AI, but how effectively they will work alongside it. In a few years, basic AI usage will likely be as commonplace as using spreadsheets or search engines today.”
However, the requirement for traditional skills have not been completely abandoned. Instead of AI skills being the factor that determines attractiveness in the job market, Stahl believes employers will increasingly seek individuals who combine technological literacy with domain expertise and human judgement. Graduates must understand the mechanics and limitations of AI systems, and how to integrate them into business processes. At the same time, deciding where and how to implement the technology, and being able to assess its effectiveness, relies on deep knowledge of a particular field.
“Perhaps most importantly, uniquely human capabilities will become more valuable rather than less. Critical thinking, creativity, communication, leadership, ethical reasoning, and the ability to work across disciplines will remain difficult to automate. As AI becomes more capable of executing routine tasks, human contribution will shift toward defining problems, interpreting results, managing uncertainty, and making strategic decisions,” he says.
The challenge he sees for the education sector is not just to train students to use AI tools, but to prepare them to lead in AI-enabled organisations.
New research led by Nyenrode Business University reinforces this perspective, advising a human-first approach to product development. Researchers Stefanie Beninger and Dieter Vlaminck at Nyenrode advocate treating AI as a “synthetic teammate” that enhances but never replaces human effort.
This approach integrates AI as a valuable team player, capable of enhancing innovation while human intuition remains in the driving seat. The AI is treated akin to a junior teammate, capable of providing valuable contributions but requiring close management to avoid risks such as errors, bias, and potential misuse of data.
Further work from the University of Vaasa backs up this perspective, finding that humans’ treatment of AI significantly influences its impact on our professional lives. Removing hype and hysteria so that AI is not framed as either a harbinger of doom nor a silver bullet solution, and learning to collaborate with the technology will ensure human career progression for years to come
The impact of a for-profit structure on innovation
Stepping back from the impact on the wider business and education landscape, both Stahl and Zhang note that, as tech companies like OpenAI settle into a for-profit structure, the long-term impact on their capacity to innovate is difficult to predict.
“The relationship between a for-profit structure and innovation is complex. On one hand, becoming a for-profit company can significantly enhance a firm’s ability to innovate because it provides access to much larger pools of capital. At the same time, public ownership introduces new pressures. As firms mature, they often face a tension between pursuing breakthrough innovations and meeting quarterly expectations,” says Stahl.
In his view, the key issue is not whether a for-profit structure helps or harms innovation; it’s whether organisations can maintain the right mindset to continue innovating while operating under market discipline. While many of the most innovative companies in history have been publicly traded, others have struggled to balance shareholder expectations with ambitious research agendas.
Zhang also highlights the need for long-term thinking and commitments to responsible practice.
“Frontier AI is extremely expensive. A for-profit structure can make it easier to raise the money needed to support the scale of development. It may also make innovation more commercially focused. This can be positive, because it pushes research into practical applications and makes AI tools more useful for businesses and consumers. However, there is also a risk. Not all valuable innovation is immediately profitable,” she says.
In her view, the underlying challenge is a governance one: whether a company can use commercial capital to support frontier research while still maintaining strong safeguards, accountability, and commitment to responsible AI development.
The outcomes
As OpenAI and Anthropic move towards opening new revenue streams with public listings on the stock market, the governance challenges they face will likely only intensify.
If they can transform the heightened pressure of entering this commercial crucible into further innovations, their influence across industries is likely to be cemented.
For businesses, that means accepting the era of AI tools is already over; the era of AI teammates is already on the doorstep. For educators, the challenge is to prepare graduates for a world in which AI literacy is not exceptional – it’s the norm.
Jamie Hose
Jamie Hose is a writer and columnist for BlueSky Thinking. Formerly a freelance copywriter and student broadcaster, Jamie is the author of over 100 published articles with 100,000+ views or higher, including with Poets&Quants, Concrete, AllOutKings, and Trill. He has a BA in English Literature with Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia (UEA).
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