By Mackenzie Ferguson
Publication Date: 2026-06-10 04:33:00
Srinivas was notably bullish on the upcoming Anthropic and OpenAI IPOs — despite them being competitors. “I think it’s important for the AI industry that these IPOs go well, and I actually think they will go well, because they’re doing well,” he told.1 “We are very happy for their success, because their success means they’ll be able to invest more into frontier model development. And every time AI gets better, Perplexity gets better.”
This is Perplexity’s structural advantage: unlike frontier labs that build foundation models, Perplexity is an AI applications company. It ingests and cites from multiple models — GPT‑4, Claude, its own — to deliver real‑time search results. Every advance in the underlying models makes Perplexity’s answer engine more useful. When frontier labs spend billions making AI smarter, Perplexity gets the upgrade for free.
Srinivas did acknowledge risk, telling 1 there would be “ripple effects if they don’t go well, like there is no sugar coating on that.” He added that SpaceX’s IPO this week “will definitely be a leading indicator of how Anthropic or OpenAI will go out.”
