The first AI lab to IPO gains a significant strategic advantage. A successful IPO could absorb available investor capital and momentum, making a competitor's subsequent offering more difficult. Conversely, a failed IPO could pop the "AI bubble" and close the window for everyone, making timing a high-stakes gamble.

Anthropic's rumored plan to go public before OpenAI is a strategic threat. If Anthropic IPOs first with a clearer path to profitability, it could absorb significant investor demand for AI stocks, putting OpenAI in a weaker position and forcing it to accelerate its own, less-prepared public debut.

The modern ETF landscape is characterized by issuers launching a high volume of specialized products, including leveraged single-stock and long-tail crypto ETFs. They accept that many will fail, hoping a few become highly profitable hits.

The race between OpenAI and Anthropic to go public involves a strategic trade-off. Going first captures market buzz and initial investor excitement. However, a poor stock performance could chill the entire market for subsequent AI IPOs, creating a dilemma: seize the hype or let a rival test the waters first.

With companies like SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic potentially going public, the fight for coveted, brand-aligned ticker symbols like "MARS" or "GPT" will become a significant subplot. The first company to file will snag these valuable branding assets, creating strategic urgency and a public "outburst" around the IPO.

SpaceX is reportedly targeting a $1.5 trillion IPO to raise $30 billion. This capital isn't just for rockets but to fund a new AI infrastructure business: data centers in space. This represents a significant strategic shift, leveraging its launch dominance to compete in the AI compute market by acquiring massive quantities of GPUs.

The enormous capital required for AI development is exhausting private markets. This forces giants like the combined SpaceX/xAI entity, OpenAI, and Anthropic towards IPOs, marking a shift back to public markets for funding as the sole source for sufficient capital.

A potential merger between xAI and the IPO-ready SpaceX would allow Elon Musk to take an AI company public far ahead of rivals OpenAI and Anthropic. This move serves as an "end run" around the traditional process, aiming to capture the first-mover advantage and the narrative as the primary public AI investment.

Companies like SpaceX and OpenAI command massive private valuations partly because access to their shares is scarce. An IPO removes this barrier, making the stock universally available. This loss of scarcity value can lead to a valuation decline, a pattern seen in other assets like crypto when they became easily accessible via ETFs.