Wall Street is busy preparing for what could become the three biggest initial public offerings in history. SpaceX has already gone public, and Anthropic and OpenAI are expected to follow suit. Yet even as investors scramble to get in, doubts are growing over whether these frontier AI labs can ever generate enough value to justify their astronomical spending.

The sheer scale of it is just staggering. Anthropic lost more than $8 billion last year despite generating $4.6 billion of revenue, and has already committed more than $500 billion to the computing power and artificial intelligence infrastructure it will need to keep growing in the years ahead.

OpenAI, meanwhile, expects revenue to rise almost tenfold—from $36 billion this year to $350 billion by 2030—yet still projects a cumulative cash burn of nearly $280 billion over the same period.

On the face of it, the economics are ugly. Even so, Anthropic’s investors believe the company could float at a valuation of more than $2 trillion. But those backers are looking in the wrong place. Frontier AI labs may never be the biggest winners of the AI race they ignited.

That’s because the companies that invent breakthrough technologies rarely capture the biggest chunk of the value the techologies generate. This value usually accrues to those who build the complementary assets, in this case the products, platforms, and services around them. And that means the frontier AI labs could end up creating enormous value without capturing most of it themselves.

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