This year, San Francisco will witness what are predicted to be some of the largest Initial Public Offerings or IPOs in history.
Anthropic announced on June 1st that it has initiated the process to go public, pushing ahead of its competitor OpenAI in the race to become profitable.
OpenAI is expected to file IPO paperwork in the coming weeks and Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which houses xAI filed on May 20th. All three companies have headquarters in the Bay Area.
Some are worried about the impact this will have on affordability in the region.
San Francisco real estate agent Austin Klar, says the AI boom has pushed real estate prices to record highs.
"And if you go, like neighborhood specific, there are certain areas that are up closer to 30 to 40 percent... a huge part of that is because of artificial intelligence,” he said.
Right now the median price for a home in San Francisco is more than 1.7 million, the highest ever recorded.
Klar acknowledges AI's role in this inflation of housing prices, “I think there’s a large cohort of people who have seen what has happened in prior kind of boom cycles, and are trying to get in front of it as best they can. I think the impact of AI is already happening, but it’s gonna get worse and that’s what’s going on.”
Anthropic has more than thirteen-hundred employees and is growing. Once the company goes public, employees who are large shareholders are expected to make millions.
Anthropic’s IPO should be announced in the next four to six months.
