Why AI CEOs are rewriting their workforce predictions ahead of IPOs
Feeling FOMO?
Four of the United States’ biggest artificial intelligence companies have announced intentions to raise an unprecedented amount of money from the public in the past two months. And, as the leadership teams of those companies work to generate a “fear of missing out” — or, FOMO — among mom-and-pop investors, they’re making sure they grab press attention through big product announcements.
“Retail investors will buy the story, not the model,” Harrison Rolfes, senior research analyst at Pitchbook, told Straight Arrow, referring to consumer-level investors.
“Retail participation matters,” Rolfes said. It is especially important at the huge scale at which AI companies are operating, he said, because their future valuations will rely heavily on how many normal people buy stock.
The story will be as compelling as firms can make it.
“I don’t want to say ‘illusion,’” Rolfes said, but retail investors are “going to have this understanding that these AI companies and SpaceX are going to change the world.”
The result: Americans can expect to see more narratives differentiating the individual AI brands, as well as emphasising AI’s future potential in general.
What does this look like?
The CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, recently announced he is “delighted to be wrong” about his earlier predictions that AI would decimate the labor market. These statements came very closely ahead of Monday’s announcement that OpenAI had filed for its IPO.
“I thought there would have been more impact on entry-level, white-collar jobs being eliminated by now than has actually happened”, Altman said in a May 26 interview. He echoed these statements a week later in a CNBC segment while standing in front of a data center construction site.
This distinct change in narrative has garnered press attention as, over the last two years, Altman has repeatedly claimed AI would lead to some jobs being “totally, totally gone,” especially in entry-level jobs and fields like customer support.
Altman was not alone in those predictions; the CEO of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, told Axios last year that “AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs,” potentially spiking unemployment to 10 to 20%.
Amodei has similarly changed his public stance on this. Last month, during a conference in New York, he said he believes AI will increase productivity rather than replace people, as people adopt it into their work.
Alan Smeaton, emeritus professor of computer studies at Dublin City University, told Straight Arrow he sees provocative predictions and reversals as attempts by AI CEOs to stay in the headlines ahead of going public. The future impact of AI on the labor market is actually not entirely clear, Smeaton said. He cited a January 2026 report from the World Economic Forum, which suggests that job losses, creations and transformations will depend on how quickly technology advances, as well as how quickly consumers adapt to it. These mixed findings are also reflected in other studies of the technology.
But splashy announcements generate media attention and develop a public brand. And that’s crucial “for companies who want to target investors who are more the mom-and-pop kind,” according to Smeaton.
“Institutions will look at the figures and financials,” he said, but “when it comes to ordinary investors, that’s where image and branding counts.”
Smeaton singled out Anthropic as a company with a carefully cultivated image of seriousness, citing its unique $1.5 billion copyright settlement with authors whose books were used as training data. He said Anthropic uses media attention to its regular public statements and announcements about industry safety and ethics, as a form of advertising.
Smeaton compared Anthropic and OpenAI with one of their primary competitors in the AI market: Google, which has been publicly traded since 2004. Google has billions of users of its product ecosystem, including Gmail and YouTube and more than 3 billion users of its Android mobile operating system. Because the company has integrated AI into its products, Smeaton said, it does not need to raise brand awareness through the media in the same way.
What’s actually happening with AI IPOs?
SpaceX, which owns xAI, confidentially filed for its IPO on April 1, and is reported to be targeting a $75 billion fundraise. Alphabet, the parent company of Google, is already public, but announced last week that it would be offering $80 billion of new shares to investors — the largest equity sale in history. Anthropic confidentially filed for an IPO on June 1, and OpenAI announced Monday that it would follow suit; the target prices and subsequent valuations of these last two have not been announced, but are expected to be in a similar range.
“These are the largest IPOs we have seen ever, and there are multiple ones nearly at the same time,” said Brad Badertscher, professor of accountancy at the University of Notre Dame, in an email to Straight Arrow. The biggest IPO in any industry to date was the Saudi Aramco public offering, which raised $25.6 billion in 2019.
“You need so many retail investors to want to invest in these companies and believe in their mission, that they’re going to do anything in their power to make it so you have to do it,” Rolfes told Straight Arrow. Early investors are likely to want their money back, he said, and might be “pushing them to IPO so that they can sell off their shares.”
These fundraises are unfolding against a backdrop of rapidly growing spending on AI. The expenditures of major AI infrastructure funders more than tripled since 2024, to $755 billion. A working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research estimates this number could grow to over $1 trillion by 2027.
What’s the benefit of participating in an IPO?
There have been enormous returns on early investments in technology IPOs in the past: A 1997 investment of $1,000 in Amazon, then 3 years old, would be worth almost $2 million today.
That was a different time. Companies today go public much later in their lifecycles than Amazon did, and the money landscape has evolved. These firms are not “new”, Badertscher said, and are already generating significant revenue. This means “the bulk of value creation happened entirely in private hands, visible only to a small circle of institutional, mutual funds and venture investors,” he said.
Using historical IPO performance as a benchmark, Badertscher told Straight Arrow he does not think retail investors would be well-served by investing in one of these big AI IPOs.
Participation in the stock market is growing fastest among those earning the least money. A March 2026 report found that the number of low-income investors — people with a median income of $29,000 — had almost tripled between 2020 and 2024.
“Retail buyers are effectively being invited to provide liquidity to insiders who have held for years at a fraction of the IPO price,” Badertscher said. He said he personally would not participate in an IPO until after the “lockout period” — the time at which early investors and employees can start to sell their cheap shares — had passed.
AI companies will continue trying to grab headlines.
“Headlines matter as people are often only consuming news by scrolling headlines rather than reading full stories,” Felix Simon, from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, told Straight Arrow in an email.
“Some research also indicates that headlines are often more negative in tone than the full stories. If we extrapolate from this, it’s possible that people are left with a shallower and one-sided understanding of AI if they mostly rely on headlines,” he said.
AI companies will continue to benefit from creating news around their products to grow their brand recognition.
“If you have the consumer mindshare, you can kind of influence people” to choose to invest in certain companies over others, Rolfes said.
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Ella Rae Greene, Editor In Chief
