Brian Smith, a 66-year-old California retiree, has been seeking exposure to Anthropic’s stock ahead of its initial public offering, spreading money across eight brokerages and potentially requesting hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of shares—about 30% of his net worth—while also putting $7,000 into two high-fee, difficult-to-trade funds claiming early access to private shares of Anthropic and OpenAI. His enthusiasm persists despite a prior experience in which he had what appeared to be more than $300,000 in another closed-end fund promising private company shares, but due to lockups and technical problems he made only around $43,000 when he sold. Smith is among a growing number of individual investors seeking access to Anthropic and OpenAI after the SpaceX frenzy; Craig Stephens, founder of Access IPOs, said his audience grew by 30% around the SpaceX IPO, with many staying as Anthropic and OpenAI head toward public markets. Anthropic is expected to sell shares in the coming weeks, and OpenAI has talked about an offering next year, even as prominent industry figures call for a pause in developing increasingly powerful AI models.