OpenAI has launched a marketplace allowing customers to retire spend commitments through 32 partners, mirroring AWS Marketplace's model. The move signals OpenAI's strategy to win through merit rather than coercion. By including Baseten, which provides access to open models, OpenAI demonstrates willingness to embrace competing models. This contrasts with Anthropic's approach, which blocks Claude Pro users from integrating with certain tools. The marketplace features caveats: only a fixed percentage of spend applies up to a cap, eligibility varies by customer and product, and billing occurs directly through partners. There's no self-service option at launch. The development positions OpenAI to benefit from customer decisions beyond model selection, potentially making its contract central to software purchasing decisions. This shift suggests AI labs are becoming the new cloud providers, whilst traditional cloud providers risk becoming less relevant to technology adoption decisions.

Michael Burry has called for a market crash severe enough to prevent OpenAI and Anthropic from going public. The Big Short investor said markets should "tank hard" for humanity's benefit, arguing the AI companies would "absorb and then destroy trillions of dollars in capital". Anthropic's prospectus reveals a $42 billion net loss in 2025 and $518 billion in planned cloud obligations, though the operating loss was closer to $8.06 billion. The company could seek a valuation above $2 trillion. OpenAI has pushed its listing to 2027. Burry endorsed a follower's joke about preventing "Skynet" from going public, referencing the Terminator franchise's rogue AI. He previously called the labs' slowdown pleas self-serving and recently swapped shorts for puts on AI-linked stocks.

Anthropic's leaked IPO prospectus revealed 2025 sales surged 1,088% to $4.59 billion, according to Reuters. However, the AI company posted a GAAP net loss of $41.97 billion last year, up from $8.31 billion in 2024. The prospectus formally warned investors that its technology may pose "existential risks to humanity." Wedbush analyst Dan Ives called the risk disclosures a "shocker" and suggested some "alarmism" in the company's warnings. Despite the losses and warnings, Ives described Anthropic as "the heart and lungs of the AI revolution," comparing the industry's current phase to "building out a new economy over the next 10 years." No official filing has been made public yet.