This is the first part of our three part series on covering the different aspects of the threats posed by Anthropic’s IPO and other mega IPOs.
Tech Oligarchs’ Bid for Control at Our Expense
Part 3: Workers’ Retirement Savings
By Natalia Renta, Associate Director for Corporate Governance & Power
The looming Anthropic IPO and other mega IPOs pose significant risks to working people’s retirement savings. If massive AI companies go public at sky-high, inflated valuations largely divorced from their fundamentals, company insiders — like founders and early venture capital and private equity investors — will be allowed to cash out, while leaving working people holding the bag through their retirement investments.
Some Anthropic investors are eyeing a $2 trillion valuation for the upcoming IPO. But Anthropic has been borrowing billions of dollars without a clear theory of how it is going to make enough money to pay off that debt and secure high enough profits to justify that valuation. In just 60 days, Anthropic incurred $71 billion in debt that is hidden off its corporate balance sheet through financial engineering strategies. Meanwhile, news reports covering Anthropic’s leaked IPO documents reveal that Anthropic lost $42 billion in 2025 and its operating loss grew from $2.98 billion in 2024 to $8.06 billion in 2025. Additionally, its margins are being squeezed by competition, costs, and attempts by business users — the bulk of Anthropic’s customer base — to lower AI costs. In other words, the Anthropic IPO will likely be an extremely speculative offering: the stock price has a long way to fall, and could potentially crater in the period after the IPO. The labor-affiliated SOC Investment Group called for a delay in the IPO.
How Anthropic is poised to end up in workers’ retirement accounts
Millions of working people have their retirement savings in index funds, which are investment vehicles that track an index, a list of assets such as stocks and bonds selected and bundled together by index providers such as S&P, FTSE Russell, and Nasdaq. Prominent examples of indices are the S&P 500, Russell 3000, and Nasdaq 100. Even though index providers in effect determine where trillions of dollars of working people’s money is invested, they are largely unregulated.
Ahead of the SpaceX IPO this past summer, major index providers changed their rules to fast-track large, recently-public companies before the market has a meaningful chance to properly price them. A notable exception is the S&P 500, which considered but discarded changes following advocacy from the AFL-CIO, Americans for Financial Reform Education Fund, and House Financial Services Committee Ranking Member Maxine Waters. The changes made by the other index providers, though, means that, just like SpaceX, Anthropic is poised to end up in workers’ retirement savings through their index fund investments days after it becomes public and while the stock price is still volatile.
Index providers can reverse course
Index providers that changed their rules ahead of SpaceX’s IPO to fast-track large, recently-public companies should treat their changes as a failed experiment and reverse course. SpaceX’s share price has been highly volatile since it went public, at its lowest point trading at under 55 percent its highest price. Ahead of the SpaceX IPO, state financial officers and Senate Banking Committee Ranking Member Elizabeth Warren wrote to the index providers, arguing against the rule changes.
In addition to reversing course because it would be beneficial to the millions of people invested in index funds, index providers should also do so because the changes they made resurface questions about whether index providers are investment advisers under the Investment Advisers Act. After all, they shape how trillions of dollars of millions of people are invested. If index providers are determined to be investment advisers, they would be exposed to much more regulation.
Pension funds and asset managers need to protect us from mega IPOs’ risks
The New York City Comptroller, the New York State Comptroller, and CalPERS (the largest public pension in the country) expressed concerns about SpaceX’s governance structure and requested changes be made before it went public, noting that SpaceX was “poised . . . to become, through index inclusion, an unavoidable holding in [their] portfolios.”
But just because index providers choose to include certain risky investments in their indices, such as recently-public AI companies, that does not mean that those who manage our retirement savings should sit idly by and expose us to unnecessary risks. An analysis from Carl F. Engstrom, partner at plaintiffs’ law firm Engstrom Lee LLC, concludes that ERISA fiduciaries — those entrusted with safeguarding $14 trillion in private sector retirement and health plan assets — could be exposed to liability if they hold SpaceX, even if through index funds. He extends this analysis to state and local pensions (with approximately $6.5 trillion in assets), because even though they are not directly governed by ERISA, their state standards are drawn from the same trust law source.
Asset managers of index funds such as BlackRock and Vanguard may also be exposed to liability if they include SpaceX in their funds without making their own independent determination whether they should do so, according to a legal memo by law firm Gupta Wessler. The memo supports the broader contention that just because index providers choose to include certain risky investments in their indices, that does not mean that the managers of the funds that track such indices should follow suit.
Regulators should be protecting workers’ retirement savings from the AI bubble
AFT President Randi Weingarten called on the Treasury Secretary and Chair of the Financial Stability Oversight Council Scott Bessent to investigate the risks of the AI bubble to the retirement security of the union’s membership. The letter specifically references the upcoming AI mega IPOs and the SEC’s proposals to deregulate public markets as exacerbating the risks posed by the AI bubble, and calls for “accelerated disclosure from public companies.” As discussed in the previous part of this series, public markets need to be regulated so there is robust transparency, accountability, and meaningful input by non-insiders. Our Congressional testimony provides more thorough recommendations for how to make index investing safer for working people.
Additionally, the Department of Labor is hard at work trying to open up 401(k)s to the private markets — including cryptocurrency, private equity, and private credit. If successful, more of workers’ retirement savings would be exposed to the AI bubble through the trillions in risky and opaque private debt being issued to finance the AI buildout. We should have more, not less, protection for the $14 trillion in workers’ deferred wages, and private markets need to be re-regulated to be dramatically shrunk and prevent companies from getting as large and powerful as Anthropic and OpenAI while still private.
