It’s not every day that a company prepares for an IPO acknowledging that its product might destroy humanity. As you’ve probably heard, Anthropic, maker of the Claude AI model, filed an S-1 with the Securities and Exchange Commission in preparation for listing its shares to the public, likely later this month. I recommend the analysis by my colleagues at PitchBook and Morningstar Equity Research, as well as a recent webinar.
My focus here is how Anthropic’s IPO might impact the broad stock market. What will it mean for investors in passive funds, including but not limited to those that track the Morningstar US Total Market Index? Thankfully, my colleague Alex Poukchanski has authored a helpful paper.
As Poukchanski points out, this is not the first “mega-IPO” of 2026. SpaceX SPCX listed its shares in June to great fanfare, at a valuation of roughly $1.8 trillion. Anthropic’s IPO is also expected to exceed $1.0 trillion, while several other sizable unicorns wait in the wings.
Such stratospheric valuations overstate the near-term impact of the mega-IPOs on the broad stock market. That said, SpaceX, Anthropic, and their ilk are helping to reshape market composition. They make a concentrated US stock market even more concentrated.
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