OpenAI Under Joint Investigation, Anthropic’s Latest Models Face Export Controls. AI Unicorns Hit Regulatory Red Lines; Will IPOs Proceed as Scheduled?

TradingKey - On June 12 local time, The Wall Street Journal, citing people familiar with the matter, reported that Attorneys General from several U.S. states have launched a joint investigation into OpenAI. OpenAI received a subpoena that same day requesting business documents related to user interaction, advertising strategies, data usage, and the protection of minors.

Meanwhile, OpenAI competitor Anthropic has also been hit with an administrative ban. According to Axios, U.S. Commerce Secretary Lutnick sent a letter to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, placing its two most advanced AI models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, under export controls.

Is it purely a coincidence that both companies are facing regulatory escalation on the eve of their IPOs? Will this heighten compliance risks for both and affect their IPO timelines?

Why Misfortunes Never Come Singly for OpenAI and Anthropic?

The joint investigation announced on June 12 is not the only administrative hurdle OpenAI has faced recently. According to Bloomberg, earlier this month, Florida filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman, alleging that the company ignored safety warnings and brought ChatGPT to market despite knowing it was harmful to users. This marks the first such lawsuit filed by a state government in the U.S. Previously, a Canadian mother filed a lawsuit in a California court against OpenAI and Altman, alleging that ChatGPT failed to properly address her 24-year-old daughter's repeated expressions of suicidal ideation, which ultimately led to a tragedy.

Anthropic is primarily facing export controls. After receiving a letter from the Department of Commerce, the company stated in a declaration that it had disabled access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all users, while simultaneously expressing public opposition to the decision. According to Axios, citing a government official, the U.S. Department of Commerce issued the sudden ban because another company claimed to have successfully breached the security safeguards of the Mythos model. Previously, Mythos had demonstrated vulnerability-cracking capabilities far exceeding those of human security experts in testing; if its security safeguards were breached, hackers could potentially use the tool to attack U.S. government systems and financial networks. According to official sources, the models subject to export controls must remain locked until the U.S. government's national security infrastructure has been fortified, which could take several weeks.

In fact, this is not the first time Anthropic has clashed with the U.S. government, as the two have a "long-standing history of friction." In March of this year, CEO Dario Amodei rejected a request from the U.S. Department of Defense for unrestricted use of the company's Claude model for "all lawful purposes," and Anthropic was subsequently placed on the "Supply Chain Risk" list.

AI Unicorn IPOs Stalled; Valuation Logic May Be Upended

Some analysts point out that the regulatory pressure on both Anthropic and OpenAI indicates that the conflict within the AI industry has escalated into a strategic game between corporations and regulators. However, the Trump administration's intent is not to suppress innovation among AI unicorns; a U.S. government official stated that Trump "does not want to harm the industry and wants innovation to move forward." According to a report by NOTUS on June 4, three people familiar with the matter revealed that senior U.S. officials have discussed government equity participation with several AI companies, hoping the firms will voluntarily cede partial shares rather than being forced to do so.

Currently, OpenAI is preparing for a confidential IPO filing, while Anthropic has already submitted its listing documents. Whether the U.S. government acquires equity in both companies before or after their IPOs, or uses administrative means to block their listings, the potential impact will be significant.

First, this could impact commercial operations. Regarding the U.S. Department of Commerce's export controls, Anthropic stated that applying these enforcement standards industry-wide would effectively stall the deployment of new models by all frontier model providers. If these models cannot successfully reach key overseas markets, corporate revenues could be halved, making valuations unsustainable.

Second, given the pressure from government agencies, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) may subject both companies to rigorous re-examination of their legal, ethical, compliance, and geopolitical risks. This would make it more difficult for these companies to clearly disclose future risks to retail and institutional investors in the short term.

If these two companies are forced to accept the Trump administration's equity terms in the future for various reasons, their valuation logic will be completely rewritten—both order structures and revenue sources will be heavily impacted, and business and R&D models will be completely overhauled. By then, they will no longer be high-growth AI stocks with significant valuation potential, but rather defense-oriented enterprises that have lost their independence and face restricted growth.