Splitting hairs

Happy Monday, friends, and welcome to a new workweek. The AI IPO race split in two over the weekend, after the industry started to show signs of fraying seams amid safety concerns.

Nvidia is in talks to anchor Anthropic's IPO with up to USD 10 bn, Reuters reports, as the company looks to raise USD 100 bn at a USD 2 tn valuation in what would be the largest listing on record.

REMEMBER- QIA and MGX are already inside: Qatar’s fund backed Anthropic’s 2025 round, MGX co-led this year’s USD 30 bn raise, and Gulf investors have committed an estimated USD 7.5 bn to the company across prior rounds. The listing lets them cash out or double down, and they will be making that call in public.

Hours later, the other half of the race stepped back from the market. Dario Amodei published We Must Pace the Frontier, an essay urging labs to slow capability gains deliberately. Sam Altman then told Fortune that an OpenAI listing this year would be “ill-advised” given safety concerns, and endorsed Amodei's proposal on X. MGX holds equity in both — one position courting a USD 10 bn anchor investor, the other declining to come to market at all, in the same portfolio.

Meanwhile, the rate backdrop got harder on Friday. US CPI rose 0.4% in August and 3.4% y-o-y, with core at 0.3% and 2.4%. Gasoline did more than a third of the monthly work, up 3.9% on the month and 27.4% over the year, and the energy index is up 16.3% y-o-y. The Hormuz premium has arrived in the US print, which is the transmission line from our shipping lanes to the cost of every project on the regional pipeline.

That backdrop will feature in the US Federal Reserve’s two-day meeting, which starts tomorrow, with Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, and others calling a rate hike on the back of persistent inflation. That would hit a market already carrying the heaviest global yields since 2008. –Salma