A SpaceX ad on a digital billboard in Times Square celebrates the launch of SpaceX’s initial public offering in New York on June 12, 2026.
Angela Weiss | AFP | Getty Images
Looking ahead to 2026, investors will space xAnthropic, OpenAI.
But now, with OpenAI refusing to make its public market debut in 2026 and several other planned products postponed this year, investors will have to settle for less than they expected at the beginning of the year.
Speculators on prediction market platform Karshi believe Anthropic is the only major company left that could formally announce an IPO this year, and Anthropic secretly filed a prospectus with the Securities and Exchange Commission in early June.
Karshi’s market is asking traders whether they think a series of companies will formally announce IPOs in 2026. The question of what constitutes a public announcement is resolved by whether the SEC declares a company’s S-1 effective, determines the IPO price, or whether an exchange assigns a ticker to the stock. Contracts are settled using various media outlets as sources of information.
Of the 23 companies listed and available for trading on Kalsi’s market, only Anthropic has a greater than 50% chance of formally announcing an IPO this year (75% as of Monday morning).
Traders in January gave a 50% chance that financial technology company Plaid would debut on the public markets this year. They give the company, currently valued at $8 billion in private markets, only a 10% chance of going public.
HR and payroll platform Deal Inc.’s odds were 50-50 in February, but speculators now see only a 3% chance the company will go public in 2026. Databrix, a cloud and artificial intelligence platform, had odds of over 50% in January, but now they are only 1%.
Similarly, Anthropic’s biggest rival, OpenAI, has just a 3% chance of going public after CEO Sam Altman said last month that it didn’t make sense to go public amid concerns about the safety of AI. Kalshi traders have just 50-50 odds OpenAI will make a formal IPO announcement by June 2027.
increasing postponement
In recent weeks, we have seen an increase in IPO postponements across all sectors. And while IPO revenues have increased significantly this year, driven by the debut of megacap stocks, especially space x The number of U.S. IPOs priced this June was actually 33% lower compared to 2025, according to Renaissance Capital.
Investors are betting that big AI companies, as well as those whose products are contributing to the advancement of AI, will move from private to public markets in search of a larger pool of capital to finance their development. Many are growing at a breakneck pace and public markets are seen as the next step to support that growth.
But last week, Anthropic’s optimistic growth assumptions were cast into doubt when it revealed third-quarter sales of $16.8 billion, slower quarter-over-quarter growth than in previous periods.
22V Research analyst Dovin Peterson wrote on Sunday: “Given the reasons for the sales growth slowdown in September and trends such as (large language model) pricing pressures, we now have more questions than answers about whether Anthropic can grow sales at the pace the market expects.” “Ultimately, the revised IPO valuation range starting at $1.5 trillion versus prior expectations of at least $2 trillion was seen as a disappointment, adding fuel to the fire for AI stocks that were already under pressure.”
Disclosure: CNBC and Kalsi have a commercial relationship that includes customer acquisition and minority ownership.
