Soon, with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Grok all set to enter the public markets, we will be able to exert similar influence over what are now all privately held entities.
This is an underappreciated implication of AI company IPOs: going public doesn't just raise capital, it converts private decision-making into a domain subject to shareholder resolutions, proxy votes, and public disclosure requirements. The governance leverage that currently applies to Alphabet and Microsoft will extend to the frontier AI labs — a structural accountability shift that no amount of voluntary safety commitments currently provides.