The AI's assault on the stock market, "turning point" for Claude and ChatGPT

The AI's assault on the stock market, "turning point" for Claude and ChatGPT

The technology sector discusses the effects of OpenAI and Anthropic's IPOs on users after SpaceX's setbacks

BarcelonaThe incursions into the stock market of the two competitors leading the race of commercial artificial intelligence – Anthropic (Claude) and OpenAI (ChatGPT)– are touching. While the market entry of Dario Amodei's company is expected to occur this fall, Sam Altman's tech company "will be a public company by 2027, or even sooner," according to CFO Sarah Friar last Wednesday, during a meeting with employees. Read it all

Both companies are accelerating the race to achieve a higher valuation than their rival, under the watchful eye of the market. The two stock market launches will be judged by the same yardstick with which the first partially AI-focused player that made it into the New York indexes was judged: SpaceX, by Elon Musk. The technology company, with aerospace roots, made the biggest stock market debut in history in June after raising $75 billion from new investors. Although there are no concrete projections yet, the market expects Anthropic's to be even larger, with an initial valuation of around two trillion dollars – compared to Musk's $1.77 trillion tag – and that it could raise over $100 billion.

These stratospheric figures inevitably generate a certain dizziness among analysts and sector experts. XTB analyst Adrián Hostaled pointed out on Friday, in an article on the financial firm's website, the "unprecedented magnitude that the AI boom" is reaching in the stock market. This boom, however, could affect business models in the short term, given that both Anthropic and OpenAI "will come under scrutiny, as they will have to report results to the stock market regulator, and the market will look at them," according to Aleix Valls, founder of WeArtificial.

Both the market and the technology sector, that is to say, are still waiting to see what investors' reaction will be to the stock market exits. As Josep Curto, founder of Athena Core, explains, the entry into the continuous market of OpenAI and Anthropic means "no longer being start-ups funded with venture capital". It also states that initial public offerings mark a paradigm shift where shareholders could begin to demand "better investment returns", and that at the end of the road lies "the end of AI subsidies": the moment when service providers will stop depending on external investments and will have to fill their income statements with their own business model.

Valls, however, anticipates that investor return demands will not be immediate. Despite shareholder scrutiny, the expert sees it as more relevant that the two AI giants "fulfill their strategic narrative." For ChatGPT, this would mean accelerating user acquisition even further, while Claude would be more geared towards the corporate world. Of course, both companies are facing an "inflection point" in their business strategies or, rather, in the margin they have to demonstrate their viability.

In any case, going public makes it more urgent to tackle the big problem of the two AI service providers: monetization. In fact, as the Reuters agency reported last week, a large part of the valuation Anthropic may receive in the IPO will depend on its ability to approach $200 billion in revenue by 2028, a figure that would more than quadruple its current annualized projection, which is around $47 billion. Therefore, while in Valls's view "it is still too early to ask for monetization models," the market expects paths to profit.

For Curto, this expectation will have effects on users and he believes there will be "more aggressive segmentation" between free and paid accounts, with "many more restrictions on capabilities" for those who do not pay. It should be said that these distinctions already apply now: the paid versions of Claude and OpenAI give access to more generation capacity, and also open the doors to more advanced models. However, it is not yet a "significant enough differential" to channel users to the paid segment. "The use of tokens"still miserable", observes Valls, meaning users rarely consume the entire margin left by applications.

For the founder of WeArtificial, stock market exits are the starting point for "new experiences" that add value to models. "We don't want AI, we want the benefits of AI," he says. Thus, according to Valls, we will see how investments accelerate in programming or buying new applications that can be integrated into their chatbots. Not going any further, Anthropic announced at the beginning of August the acquisition of Decart AI, an Israeli platform for video creation and system optimization within AI models. "We will begin to see new native businesses, where artificial intelligence is structural," reflects Valls.

Beyond paywalls and new apps, AI companies have long been searching for a gold mine: in-app advertising content. So far, all attempts have failed, as demonstrated by the attempt to create an AI-based search engine, Perplexity, to implement an advertising strategy. Its head of advertising, executive Taz Patel, left the company only nine months after joining due to the impossibility of applying a profitable model.

For the experts consulted, advertising within AI clashes with two particularly solid barriers: critical mass and consumer trust. Unlike digital environments like Google, which are already practically universal, ChatGPT or Claude still have too few users for an ad monetization model to be profitable, says Valls. On the other hand, Curto maintains that an overly aggressive advertising implementation "would break the trust" between the user and the application. "If the answers given by an LLM [large language model AI] are sponsored, they won't be the best, but rather the ones that pay the most," he observes.

While waiting for new ways to generate revenue, therefore, ads are "an unsolved challenge" in a segment where business will become increasingly urgent. For Valls, innovations will be essential to keep capital tied up. "Investors' patience will be there if companies are able to build native experiences and applications" and, with them, AI-based billing models. What they will be is still a mystery: "And what will come next? No idea".