The two most powerful private companies in artificial intelligence are urging the industry to slow down, while diverging on plans for market debuts; a contradiction that rattled AI-related stocks on Monday.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in an interview with Fortune published Saturday that an IPO now would be "ill-advised," pushing back one of the most anticipated public offerings in recent memory to at least 2027.
His comments arrived on the same day that Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published a 3,800-word essay calling on AI companies to deliberately slow how fast they improve their most advanced models.
Altman said he agreed that the industry needs to pace development to give society time to adapt to increasingly powerful systems, while Elon Musk, whose firm xAI has developed Grok, also publicly backed Amodei's latest proposal.
The rare convergence among fierce commercial rivals signaled that mounting concerns about AI safety have moved from the research margins to the executive suite and are now beginning to reshape business plans.
Anthropic, valued at $965 billion earlier this year, confidentially filed its IPO prospectus in June and has been widely expected to list its shares as soon as next month.
Anthropic has selected Nasdaq for a potential listing, according to Business Insider, and is in talks with Nvidia about becoming an anchor investor in the offering. Nvidia could invest as much as $10 billion, while Anthropic is considering raising as much as $100 billion at a valuation of around $2 trillion. Those discussions remain preliminary and could change, sources said.
Anthropic's annualized revenue run rate surpassed $65 billion by the end of July 2026, reflecting deep enterprise adoption of its Claude model family. That figure represented more than a sevenfold increase from roughly $9 billion at the end of 2025, according to the same report. Preliminary revenue for the second quarter of 2026 exceeded $11.5 billion, compared with only $787 million in the same period of 2025.
The gap between Amodei's public rhetoric and Anthropic's commercial momentum is hard to ignore. Anthropic agreed to $517 billion in compute commitments covering 14.8 gigawatts of capacity in the 11 months through August 2026, according to The Information, even as its CEO publicly called on the industry to pump the brakes on AI development.
Gil Luria, equity analyst at D.A. Davidson, told CNBC he did not think investors would necessarily view the slowdown calls as a negative. "Unless the companies are genuine and say, 'OK, we're not going to IPO, we're not going to use any more compute, we're not going to train any more models' - that's not what they're saying," Luria said.
The flurry of safety statements followed a week of internal turbulence that spilled into public view.
Jacob Coxon, who worked as a researcher at both Anthropic and OpenAI, said in a post on X that he resigned out of concern that the two companies are "gambling with our lives." He said the people building AI "earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade."
Evan Hubinger, the Alignment Science Lead at Anthropic, wrote on X that he and his colleagues do "earnestly believe AI could kill all humans," and he pegged his own estimate at more than 10% in the next decade. Hubinger said the company was "trying its best" but does not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence.
Adding further urgency, Anthropic released its September 2026 Threat Intelligence Report, detailing how its Claude models had been misused for cyber operations, influence campaigns, weapons research, and large-scale fraud between December 2025 and August 2026. The report covers activity Anthropic disrupted across seven harm areas - including cyber operations, influence operations, surveillance, scams and fraud, biological misuse, conventional weapons development, and distillation - noting that Claude Haiku, Sonnet, and Opus models were used in the misuse cases.
For independent financial advisors and RIAs, the week's events cut in two directions. On one hand, the safety debate underscores cybersecurity risks that are already reshaping practice management - a theme InvestmentNews has tracked closely as AI adoption surges across the advisory industry. Generative AI usage among advisors surged to 68 percent in 2026, up from 49 percent the prior year, according to Escalent's 2026 Advisor Brandscape report.
On the other hand, the prospect of coordinated AI slowdowns - enforced through international agreement or regulatory pressure - could slow the pace of advisor technology improvements that many firms have built business cases around.
Which AI platform RIAs should be using has become one of the central practice management questions of 2026, with firms now forced to weigh not just performance and cost but governance and vendor stability.
Global AI-related stocks fell on Monday after Amodei published his essay, with investors concerned that an industry-wide slowdown in AI development could have ripple effects for companies across the sector and curb adoption.
Bloomberg's weekend survey of strategists concluded that the calls may weigh on chipmakers in the near term, but that the broader trade is likely to stay intact as spending on computing infrastructure remains strong.
Amodei's essay proposed a three-step approach: embedding independent third-party evaluators inside leading AI labs, establishing common safety standards among democratic countries, and eventually negotiating international limits on the most dangerous AI capabilities.
He called for international cooperation around AI development and said labs need to embed third-party evaluators to report incidents and track safety practices, adding that Anthropic would take that step unilaterally.
CNBC reporter Deirdre Bosa noted that the more OpenAI and Anthropic believe that commercial pressures will drive AI companies to grow too fast, the more difficult it becomes for them to go public, since public markets add additional pressure including growth expectations, quarterly reports, and stock prices that fluctuate every second.
That pressure is also arriving alongside a macro event. The Federal Reserve is scheduled to announce its next rate decision on September 16, 2026, a move that analysts note could matter as much for AI sector valuations as any CEO essay. Advisors managing client portfolios exposed to tech and growth equities will need to hold both threads simultaneously.
For now, the industry is left with a striking paradox: the companies best positioned to profit from AI's acceleration are the ones most loudly calling for a pause. Whether investors, regulators, and clients believe them is another question entirely. InvestmentNews will continue tracking how AI developments reshape advisory practice as the IPO calendars for both Anthropic and OpenAI come into clearer focus.
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