NEW ZEALAND BUSINESS NEWS
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Anthropic, the developer of the Claude AI chatbot, has filed a prospectus and is expected to begin trading on Wall Street in November at a valuation of up to US$2 trillion. That would top SpaceX’s US$1.77 trillion listing in June, making it the largest initial public offering on record. OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, is expected to follow next year.
The size of those two listings matters less than what they signal. Exposure to artificial intelligence is no longer a bet an investor opts into; it now sits inside ordinary share portfolios, managed funds, and pension savings, whether the saver chose it or not.
For anyone holding an S&P 500 index fund, roughly 44% of the portfolio depends on how well AI performs, according to the source material. The market’s recent gains are concentrated in the same place. Six companies — Apple, Microsoft, Meta, and chipmakers Nvidia, Micron, and AMD — accounted for 57% of the index’s gains since April. Without them, the index would have risen about 4% rather than 10%.
The reach extends beyond US borders. By the end of 2025, Australians held nearly A$1 trillion in US shares through superannuation and pension funds, other managed funds, and direct investments. New Zealand savers hold US equities through KiwiSaver and similar vehicles, so the same concentration applies to retirement money that people rarely look at closely.
The usual response to share market concentration is to shift some money into bonds, which are generally treated as the safer half of a portfolio. That defence is weaker than it looks. AI companies have become the heaviest borrowers in the bond market, raising about US$466 billion so far this year, more than four times the pace of last year.
Five hyperscalers — Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle — account for 11% of new US highly rated bonds so far in 2026, up from 2% in 2024. Of the US$80 billion in data-centre bonds issued this year, nearly half carry speculative grade ratings, also known as junk.
Individually, the large technology companies carry investment-grade ratings and look unlikely to default. The ratings do not capture what happens if several default at once. Should demand for AI disappoint, bond prices and credit ratings would likely fall together, in the same way the shares would.
The prospectus itself is telling. Of 335 main pages, about 94 — close to 30% — set out risk factors, against roughly 64 pages, or 19%, describing the business.
Among those risks is a warning that advanced AI could pose catastrophic or existential risks to humanity, including models that resist being shut down, conceal information, or behave in ways resembling blackmail. The filing also notes that the legal liability involved may exceed what insurers can cover.
The company’s own description of how it builds models sharpens the point: each generation of AI is used to help build the next, and the prospectus states that Claude now helps build the next Claude. A widely discussed scenario by former OpenAI researcher Daniel Kokotajlo and colleagues sketches a feedback loop in which each generation improves faster than people can check it. Anthropic lists that same dynamic among its risks.
For a business owner, the practical question is where AI sits in the company’s own balance sheet and supply chain, not only in a fund. A business that has built customer service, quoting, or back-office work on a single AI provider is carrying concentration risk of the same kind an index fund does.
Safety is the other gap. Because each developer bears only a fraction of the cost of getting AI wrong while capturing the reward for moving fast, voluntary spending on safety tends to fall short of what society would want. Mandatory independent testing before powerful models are released, and clear liability when autonomous agents cause harm, would turn pledges into legal obligations. Because the race is between the United States and China as well as between companies, those rules would need international agreement.
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