What's the best visual analogy for a teetering AI-led bull market? For Stop Funding Billionaires, a group that's been protesting high-profile IPOs this year, the answer is a six foot tall game of Jenga. The group deployed the protest tool at a recent #BlocktheIPO demonstration in San Francisco, aimed at Anthropic's debut set for next week.
Organizer Jonathan Westin told Business Insider that the market feels increasingly precarious, and that the organization is concerned about Americans' exposure to the risks of the AI bubble popping. "It continues to be this very speculative shell game," he said of the tech-fueled market boom.
"It feels like a game of Jenga where if one thing falls, the whole system will fall." Stop Funding Billionaires staged two protests recently, first in front of Anthropic's office in New York City on November 9, and one a day later near the AI lab's office in San Francisco, where they unveiled the Jenga game, made by a Bay Area artist.
The reason they say Anthropic shouldn't go public is rooted in the same argument made by many of the market's AI bears: the future of AI is uncertain, and if the bull market collapses, it could compromise the retirement savings of working Americans and retirees.
Though the excitement is high on Wall Street, a cohort of investing pros share the more bearish sentiment, and see Anthropic being a speculative investment when it hits public markets.
"It comes down to investment risks that are going to be borne by working people, particularly working people whose retirement savings are exposed to it, which will be virtually anyone who is in an index fund," said fellow organizer, Elizabeth Parisian.
The group raised similar concerns when SpaceX began trading in June, protesting the historic IPO and sounding the alarm that changing the requirements to fast-track the newly minted stock into major indexes poses outsize risks to Americans' investment portfolios.
Ahead of the SpaceX offering, market participants from normal retirees to professional investors dismay at the fact that rules were being bent in a way that could mean people would be exposed to Elon Musk's rocket and AI company whether they wanted to or not. "There's just so much at stake for regular people, and Anthropic is just plowing ahead," Westin noted.
"Regardless of all of these concerns, I think in many ways, it's trying to become too big to fail, similar to the banks in the 2008 crash, and this feels eerily familiar to us." Westin's views aligns with prominent tech and AI bears, including "The Big Short" investor Michael Burry, who recently said that it would be beneficial for humanity if a stock market crash were to prevent Anthropic and OpenAI from going
public.
Westin was among five protesters arrested at the demonstration in New York, though he said he has no regrets and believes that more direct action is needed to help the public understand the risks related to giant IPOs from Anthropic and others. "Unfortunately, the financial system is now set up in a way where it's very opaque to the regular person what's at stake here," he said.
"If we can do more to shed light on how these IPOs are going to affect our everyday people, we think the more the better." Anthropic did not respond to a request for comment.