AI bubble fears hit OpenAI, Anthropic employees

Wealth advisors who work with employees at Anthropic, OpenAI and other frontier AI firms say they're fielding the same anxious question in nearly every meeting: what happens to my money if this is a bubble?

Compound Planning, which manages more than $5bn in assets, says the sheer speed of client wealth creation has become disorienting for the people living through it.

Anthropic, valued at roughly $40bn in 2024, is reportedly being pitched to investors at a valuation of around $2 trillion ahead of a possible October IPO, according to the Financial Times.

SpaceX and OpenAI have seen similarly dramatic run-ups. "The dollar amounts have gotten so big, so fast," said Nicholas Garcia, a principal wealth advisor at the firm.

Garcia believes only about 5% of his clients are true panic sellers, whereas a much bigger group is discreetly making their liquidation plans based on reaching certain price levels.

Many are using tax-loss harvesting, direct indexing and variable prepaid forwards to offset the tax consequences of gains accumulated over such a short period.

"At Mercer Advisors, where we manage $111bn of assets, the number one worry of our technology clients has been 'concentration risk,' the concentration of a company's stock," says wealth advisor Adam Govani.

But 5% to 10% of his clients by Garcia's estimation are exiting with a vengeance, putting their money toward Bay Area housing, vacation real estate and expensive cars.

Others are rotating into commercial real estate, municipal bonds for tax relief, or neocloud stocks such as Nebius and CoreWeave, which have posted triple-digit gains this year.

At Tidemark Financial Partners, roughly half of clients want less tech exposure, while the other half are positioning to buy more if a crash actually arrives.