America’s leading AI labs are set to spend the second half of this year preparing for initial public offerings that will vault them into instant megacap status. Anthropic, valued at $965 billion in May, is slated to debut as early as October, and OpenAI, valued at $852 billion in March, is likely to follow in 2027.

As listings loom, questions about the nature of the companies’ token-payment business model are getting louder. Palantir CEO Alex Karp blasted the model last week, telling CNBC that “something has gone completely wrong.” Enterprise customers have begun to question the burdensome cost of pay-per-use token consumption and look to cheaper, less sophisticated open-weight models. So can the world’s two great AI labs keep up the pace?

Karp About It

The aggressive adoption of agentic AI in some workplaces this year led to the creation of the slang term tokenmaxxing. That’s what happens when engineers, under pressure to demonstrate they are integrating the new technology but with no clear guidelines, use AI models to excess. Executives have quickly realized this isn’t the most efficient way of doing business. As a result, companies including Uber, Microsoft, Salesforce and Meta have taken steps to ration their employees’ use of advanced AI because the token payment structure preferred by Anthropic and OpenAI has proven more expensive than it’s worth.

Speaking to TBPN, Palantir’s Karp said the excessive use of AI without regard for whether it creates value is “kind of like a porn addiction.” During his CNBC appearance, he said the US AI industry should not dismiss the potential for cheaper open-weight models, especially those in development in China, to close the gap:

• Beijing startup Z.ai’s GLM-5.2 model is now ranked among the top 10 large language models by Artificial Analysis, and is ranked as the second-best model for web development by AI evaluation platform Code Arena, placing it alongside Anthropic, OpenAI and Google. The open-weight model is also four to six times cheaper than frontier AI.
• Some US and international enterprise customers have already reported switching to cheaper Chinese models like DeepSeek and cutting back on payments to OpenAI and Anthropic.

Raising the Stakes: The Financial Times reported last week that OpenAI has held talks with the Trump administration about giving the US government a 5% stake. But the paper said its proposal hinges on other US AI labs, like Anthropic, agreeing to do the same. Experts, meanwhile, warn that recent export controls on advanced US AI models may accelerate the international adoption of models developed by Chinese firms. Two respected Silicon Valley financiers who have the president’s ear understand this: Former Trump advisor David Sacks and current Trump advisor Marc Andreessen have both noted GLM-5.2’s power in recent weeks.

The ETF sandbox may have gotten a little too wild.

The Securities and Exchange Commission announced last week that it will open its doors to public comments on “novel” ETF strategies in order to protect investors and foster innovation. The move is the latest by an agency that has been skeptical of highly leveraged strategies in recent months. The issue may be that the rules that worked well for some ETFs — namely Rule 6c-11, which lets ETFs operate under the ’40 Act without having to apply for exemptive relief — may not work for increasingly complex products.

“When products get too complicated, bad things happen,” said Adam Gana, a securities lawyer for Gana Weinstein. “Rule 6c-11 may be too flexible. It focuses heavily on ETF mechanics, but it does not really answer the harder question, which is: ‘Should every strategy that can technically fit inside the ETF structure be allowed to use that structure?’”

Not So Fast

With global ETF assets recently surpassing $23 trillion, the agency’s action may be a little, well … too little, too late. Either way, it’s still a step in the right direction, said Amrita Nandakumar, president of Vident Asset Management. “The SEC’s review of so-called novel ETFs is a long-overdue reality check for an industry that may have pushed the boundaries of Rule 6c-11 too far,” she said.

Specifically, issuers may have taken advantage of the agency’s 75-day rule, under which a fund’s preliminary filing may contain generic language that the issuer can revise later. After the clock runs out, some providers modify the strategy significantly in the final prospectus, meaning the SEC can’t effectively regulate it until after it has begun trading. “Not only is it worth questioning whether 75 days is enough,” she said, “but also, are we entirely sure that some of these novel ETFs really do fall under [Rule] 6c-11, or should they be categorized differently?”

Nandakumar said some ETF categories that may now attract more agency scrutiny include:

• Private credit funds, which are subject to liquidity risk and price swings.
• Complex crypto strategies, which are costly and subject to closures.
• Single-stock derivatives, which don’t hold actual shares of a company, but instead use financial instruments like swaps to track an underlying stock and are subject to compounding decay.

Product Drift: So, what now? Given the SEC’s current Trump-appointed makeup, Gana doesn’t think there will be any kind of broad ETF rollback. What’s more likely to happen, he said, is that the agency will create a sharper distinction between traditional and “novel” funds, with more liquidity requirements, naming standards and possibly limits on certain products being marketed to retail investors — but that would be an “at best” outcome.

“ETFs began as efficient, transparent vehicles for diversified exposure,” he said. “Now we are seeing products tied to crypto assets, leverage, single-stock leveraged strategies, etc. Some of those may be appropriate. But they are not all the same from an investor-protection standpoint.”

Not everything your clients hear on the pickleball court is true.

Social Security grabs a lot of headlines with warnings of looming benefit cuts and trust fund insolvency. Financial advisors also talk a lot about the program and the importance of clients’ claiming decisions. Less attention, however, is devoted to Medicare, according to Cole Craven, co-founder of the health care cost analysis and planning platform Move Health. That gap is often filled by Medicare myths and misconceptions that mislead retirees making coverage decisions, potentially resulting in excess costs or subpar coverage. It could be a chance for advisors to provide added value to clients.

“You’ve got the opportunity to save clients a lot of money and headaches and look like an absolute superhero, but most advisors steer clear of healthcare planning in general,” Craven said.

Welcome to Mythbusters

The first and most prevalent myth that Craven sees among financial advisors is an assumption that Medicare is overly complicated, which leads many to “simply not touch” the health care question when building a retirement income strategy. There are some nuances in the program, to be sure, but the initial claiming and subsequent reenrollment decisions aren’t exactly rocket science, either. Nor are the income-based rules that trigger surcharges.

“We need to pick up A, we need to pick up B, we need to pick up a Part D drug plan, and we need to figure out what we’re doing for supplemental coverage,” Craven said. “It’s either that, or going with the Advantage approach, but that’s about it. You just need to understand how those things work and how income affects costs.” A quick overview:

• Part A, which is premium-free for many, covers hospital care, skilled nursing facility care, hospice and some home health care.
• Part B covers outpatient care, doctor visits, preventive services, lab tests, X-rays and durable medical equipment.
• Advantage or Part C is an “all-in-one” alternative to original Medicare Parts A and B, offered by private companies and often including extra benefits like vision, hearing or dental.
• Part D helps cover the cost of outpatient prescription drugs and many vaccines.

The next myth is that Medicare is a low-quality option for health care in retirement, so people end up rushing to get treatment while they’re still on private insurance or an Affordable Care Act marketplace plan. In reality, waiting for Medicare to kick in before getting a potentially delayable procedure like a hip replacement can make a lot of financial sense. Another attractive (and oft-overlooked) feature is that traditional Medicare doesn’t have a network, which is an advantage over most private insurance. “You want to go to Mayo Clinic to get that mole on your back looked at? Great, go,” Craven said.

Remember to Revisit the Drug Plan. Finally, Craven said, people fail to realize that Medicare selections aren’t set-in-stone, one-time events. For example, Part D plans’ costs and schedules of covered drugs change every year, so it’s important to review and shop around.