What Anthropic and OpenAI IPOs spell for CIOs’ AI budgets

AI pioneers Anthropic and OpenAI both appear to be headed toward IPOs, leaving IT leaders whose organizations rely on their AI models wondering what might be in store for them.

Top of mind is the possibility of higher costs for enterprise use, especially for frontier models.

By offering stock for sale, the two AI innovators will likely raise hundreds of millions of dollars to invest in their products and pay their bills. But many observers worry that by shifting their focus from private, research-focused organizations to publicly traded companies, both Anthropic and OpenAI will be under new pressure to turn a profit.

OpenAI’s enterprise customers should expect substantial price increases after an IPO, especially those who are leaning hard on API usage, copilots, agents, and custom deployments, says Mark Vena, CEO and principal analyst at IT research firm SmartTech Research.

Vena sees an Anthropic IPO landing differently, with the company’s broad focus on AI safety. “It is selling enterprise trust, safety, developer productivity, and a more buttoned-up brand of AI that CFOs and CIOs can actually explain to their boards,” he says. “Frankly, I think OpenAI is the cultural rocket ship, but Anthropic is shaping up as the institutional AI bet.”

Still, there are concerns about Anthropic’s ability to generate profits, he adds.

“Let’s face it: The big question for Anthropic is whether public investors will reward discipline or punish the brutal economics of frontier AI,” he adds. “Training models, renting compute, and keeping pace with OpenAI, Google, Meta, and xAI is insanely expensive, so Anthropic will have to prove it is more than a very elegant cash-burning machine.”

Anthropic announced that it had filed for an IPO on June 1 after news reports that OpenAI was also headed in that direction. Though OpenAI declined to comment on a potential IPO, news reports suggest that the company will announce one within the next few weeks, with the initial stock sale potentially happening in September.

IPOs would bring several other changes, Vena notes, including more transparency, more scrutiny, and more enterprise discipline around governance, uptime, security, and roadmap commitments. But new pricing models are likely as well.

“An OpenAI IPO would turn the company from a fast-moving AI lab into a Wall Street–monitored platform vendor,” Vena says. “Users should expect less ‘move fast and surprise everybody’ energy and more pressure to package, meter, and monetize everything.”

End of the research lab model

Other observers express similar fears about OpenAI’s pricing models after an IPO.

Leo Derikiants, CEO and cofounder at AI research firm Mind Simulation Lab, says IT leaders should expect steep API price hikes, the introduction of expensive premium enterprise tiers for basic data privacy, and increasingly opaque billing models.

“An OpenAI IPO signals the end of the ‘research lab’ illusion and the birth of a traditional tech monopoly,” he adds. “Public markets demand predictable, escalating revenue, but OpenAI’s core technology — autoregressive LLMs — is fundamentally unpredictable and probabilistic.”

Anthropic, meanwhile, seems to be headed toward an IPO in a stronger, more defensible position than OpenAI, he says. While both companies rely on similar probabilistic and autoregressive architectures, Anthropic has focused less on consumer-facing toys such as video generation and more on the corporate enterprise market, giving the company a stable revenue foundation, he notes.

The Anthropic IPO announcement, however, also confirms a disappointing truth — that the AI market is driven by herd mentality, Derikiants says.

“The major labs are running in circles, building the exact same probabilistic products with different branding, without questioning the architectural limits or the actual long-term value,” he says. “The industry has completely lost the original plot. The foundational goal used to be achieving true artificial general intelligence (AGI). Today, the only goal is maximizing monthly subscription revenue.”

CIOs should prepare for aggressive vendor lock-in tactics, forced ecosystem bundling, and a shift away from flexible, open-source-friendly initiatives, he predicts. The corporate focus will pivot from creating safe AI to trapping enterprise data within the company’s proprietary API walls to maximize shareholder value, he says.

AI vendors caught in an AI scaling trap, with its architecture requiring exponentially more computing power and energy to yield marginal improvements in reasoning, he adds.

“Operating these models is fundamentally inefficient and heavily subsidized by venture capital,” he notes. “Once public, Wall Street will not tolerate those massive infrastructure losses indefinitely.”

After an IPO, customers of both companies should expect new pricing models to emerge, says Richard Amos, CIO at systems integrator and cloud services provider Blue Mantis. An organization’s priorities change when it transitions from a startup to a publicly traded company, he adds.

“Before an IPO, the focus is largely on innovation, growth, and potential,” he says. “Once public, the expectations change and shareholders demand consistent quarterly performance, regulatory compliance, and enterprise-grade reliability.”

Amos expects several positive developments, with a greater emphasis on platform stability, security, compliance, and the development of more industry-specific capabilities after an OpenAI IPO.

At the same time, he expects AI vendors will move away from enterprise-wide licensing toward consumption-based pricing, mirroring trends in the public cloud market.

With many reports suggesting OpenAI is currently operating at a loss, Amos sees the company revamping its pricing models after an IPO. The company could, for example, move to premium pricing for advanced capabilities such as higher-end models, agentic workflows, and advanced orchestration.

In response, some users will adopt AI FinOps solutions to balance consumption and business value, Amos predicts. “We will see some price increases, and I believe that we will have new tools or licensing constructs to manage the cost of the ecosystem,” he adds.

New pricing model

Days before announcing its IPO, Anthropic unveiled a new metered pricing model for some of its products.

Meanwhile, OpenAI’s new Guaranteed Capacity subscription model points to a new pricing philosophy that moves the focus away from selling flexible API tokens and toward a predictable, contractually locked enterprise utility requiring companies to make upfront multi-year spending commitments, notes Eugina Jordan, CEO and cofounder at unified intelligence provider YOUnifiedAI.

OpenAI also announced a new consulting company in May.

Becoming a publicly traded company will likely increase pressure to revamp pricing, Jordan says.

“An OpenAI IPO would drastically reshape the landscape for IT leaders, shifting the company from an agile tech pioneer to a public entity tethered to Wall Street’s quarterly earnings demands,” she adds. “While a massive influx of public capital could fund the robust infrastructure needed to stabilize enterprise products, the immediate reality for users is a sharp pivot toward aggressive monetization.”

However, there’s some good news for enterprise AI users as several major competitors have emerged since OpenAI opened the AI floodgates with its release of the first version of ChatGPT in late 2022, Jordan says. Anthropic has rapidly become the default choice for enterprise developers and deep coding, Google’s Gemini has leveraged its unmatched workspace distribution, and Mistral is securing the European open-source stronghold, she notes.

“This push for predictable enterprise revenue comes at a time when OpenAI is facing a fragmented, highly aggressive competitive landscape where being the first mover is no longer a guarantee of winning,” she adds. “Much like the historic shifts where Yahoo lost to Google or MySpace fell to Facebook, OpenAI is finding that pioneering a technology is very different from scaling it, and an IPO will force them to mature rapidly, just as their competitors are successfully chipping away at their enterprise armor.”

SmartTech Research’s Vena also sees several major competitors, including Google, xAl, and Meta.

“From my perspective, OpenAI is still a leader, but it no longer owns the AI narrative uncontested,” he says. “OpenAI still has brand gravity and product momentum, but the next phase will be less about who has the flashiest demo and more about who can deliver durable, secure, cost-effective AI at scale.”