57% of Voters Believe AI Risks Outweigh the Benefits. What Does That Mean for the OpenAI and Anthropic IPOs?

OpenAI and Anthropic are both on the cusp of going public, with some investors anticipating their initial public offerings (IPOs) before the end of this year.

And while those two companies are arguably the most influential software players in artificial intelligence (AI), not everyone is thrilled with AI in general. A recent NBC poll found that 57% of registered voters believe the potential risks of AI outweigh the potential benefits.

While that may seem like a red flag for OpenAI and Anthropic, the companies probably don’t have too much to worry about. Despite the public’s concerns about AI, many investors are eager to buy AI stocks — and most are anticipating the upcoming IPOs.

Image source: Getty Images.

The public may not want AI, but investors do

In a recent survey from The Motley Fool, 62% of respondents said they were confident that companies investing heavily in AI would deliver strong, long-term returns. And among investors who already own AI stocks and AI exchange-traded funds (ETFs), the percentage jumps to 93%.

It’s not all that surprising that investors are more excited than the general public. There’s a lot of uncertainty around how AI will impact many jobs, and some bosses are forcing workers to transition their workflows in ways that use more AI systems.

But some investors are looking past the current difficulties and are instead focusing on the growth many tech giants have experienced lately. Here are some of the latest results for three top AI companies.

Data source: Yahoo Finance and YCharts.

The sale and earnings growth of these companies — and their huge share price gains — make it easy to see why investors may have high hopes for OpenAI and Anthropic stock, which they will soon be able to buy.

Both of these privately held companies recently completed massive funding rounds that no doubt drew additional attention from investors. OpenAI raised $122 billion last month at a price that pushed its valuation up to $852 billion, and Anthropic recently raised $30 billion at a level that lifted it to a $380 billion valuation.

OpenAI has 900 million weekly users, and management projects that it will have $280 billion in annual revenue by 2030. Anthropic, for its part, estimates it will have annual revenues of $150 billion by 2029. That company hasn’t officially disclosed its weekly or monthly active user counts, but some estimates put total Claude users at around 30 million.

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OpenAI and Anthropic are changing what it means to be a tech investor

There’s another side to this that investors should be aware of if they aren’t already: Tech investing has changed dramatically over the past few years.

There isn’t one tech company out there that isn’t either pivoting to AI or adapting its business to be built around it in some way. And no, I’m not talking about so-called AI companies like Allbirds, which up until a couple of weeks ago was a shoe company.

I mean that even if you’re a tech investor (and are hesitant about AI), you’re now an AI investor, like it or not. Consider that Microsoft (MSFT +1.47%), one of the leading software companies of the past 50 years, has invested billions of dollars into OpenAI and owns a nearly 27% stake in the company.

And Alphabet (GOOGL 1.54%) (GOOG 1.49%), the tech and advertising behemoth, has one of the top AI models, Google Gemini. The company’s AI already has hundreds of millions of users and will soon become the foundational model for an upcoming version of Apple‘s Siri, yet another tech giant shifting into AI.

The point I’m trying to make is that even if the public doesn’t like AI and doesn’t want to invest directly in Anthropic and OpenAI after their IPOs, the tech landscape has shifted so dramatically that the 401(k)s, IRAs, and other investment accounts of the average person are now chock-full of AI companies.

OpenAI and Anthropic are two of the biggest drivers of that change, and it’s only going to get more difficult to differentiate between a tech stock and an AI stock. So while a large swath of the public isn’t too enthusiastic about what AI will mean for them, their retirement accounts may eventually benefit from OpenAI and Anthropic’s upcoming IPOs regardless.