• Bear market fears have proven unfounded so far in 2026
• AI doomsaying imperils key structural growth drivers for equities

For months, global equites have seemed to defy gravity. Markets remain close to record highs, despite war raging in the Middle East and global sovereign bond yields at, or around, post financial crisis highs.

There have been two drivers for this equity strength: robust corporate earnings and the continued rocket fuel of AI infrastructure capex, juicing US economic growth.

These two tailwinds need to sustain through the end of 2026, or at least until the US midterms in early November, to help several IPOs in the US and Europe across the line.

Corporate earnings resilience in the face of global turmoil continues to drive equity bankers’ optimism, even as bond yield spikes spook the fixed income community.

“There is nothing that I can see at the moment which could lead to equities declining,” said one banker, speaking early last week. “We’re not seeing any major corporates in distress.

“That is usually the telltale sign for equity to decline. In fact, companies are performing well. As an investor, why would you pull back from equities when corporate results are so strong?”

A second banker noted that growth investors will consider the rate environment as part of their valuation framework, due to higher cost of capital, but that company growth and the underlying opportunity remain more important.

“I don’t think it’s one where companies say, ‘Okay, rates are going up, we’re just not going to play in the IPO market,’” he said.

Continued AI momentum key question

However, a new market challenge emerged over the weekend alongside the bond bears, in the form of the largest names in US AI model development coming together to call for a pause to offset the danger of the technology becoming uncontrollable.

Even if bond yield spikes don’t derail global IPO plans, the issues around AI investment in the last few days might prove a more pressing issue for equities.

At the start of last week, the sector was riding on a high.

OpenAI announced that an unreleased model had delivered a proof of one of humanity’s most enduring mathematical problems.

But celebration then turned to scandal amid accusations that the model had used the work of two prominent mathematicians to set up its work and then brute-forced its way to a solution with exponential compute power.

Intellectual property concerns then paled into near insignificance after a researcher from Anthropic resigned over safety concerns that AI could do exponential damage to humanity. Instead of dismissing this fear, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei accentuated it with an essay and then called for a global slowdown in AI development.

Amodei’s most harrowing prediction was that in the next six-to-12 months an AI agentic swarm “could be capable of taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet (potentially causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage)”. He added that the scale of damage would continue to increase from there if AI were to become more powerful without necessary guardrails.

Sam Altman, the CEO of Anthropic’s closest competitor OpenAI, then joined Amodei’s call. Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX made it a trinity of US frontier model developers – creating a unified call for an AI slowdown.

Cynical voices have noted that this could be a sustained effort by US frontier model developers to protect their competitive moat from far cheaper open-source alternatives. But whatever the reason for the development, the moment calls into question the continued sustainability of frontier AI capex spend.

If US frontier model developers stop spending, what does that do to global equities and the US economy as a whole?

“A lot of catalysts can shift, and we must acknowledge that AI is the dominant theme in the US and there is a huge amount of investor concentration linked to the sector,” said a third banker.

Global IPOs roll-on for now

Optimism so far this year has continued to spur global ECM issuance, on course for a spectacular year that is – at present – bested only by 2021, in terms of deal values.

Source: Dealogic

“All the bears have overestimated negatives all year and every massive iceberg that has been flagged this year has turned out to be much less of an issue than feared,” said a fourth banker.

While IPOs are the first product to take a hit when equity market risks increase, there is still a healthy pipe for the next few weeks.

Not least of all Anthropic itself, still expected to dominate the autumn calendar with an IPO that could raise up to USD 100bn at a USD 2tn valuation, despite threats its core product could wipe out humanity, or at least do hundreds of billions of dollars in damage to global internet infrastructure.

How’s that for an S-1 risk factor?

Anthropic has already delayed its filing to mid-October and, given the narrative around the sector in the last few days, surely nothing can be ruled out.

But if Anthropic does push ahead, it will be likely joined by several other issuers, including smart ring maker Oura and restaurant business Inspire Brands.

Oura filed its S-1 with the SEC before Labour Day, giving it a chance to potentially get in and out of the market before Anthropic dominates investor attention.

One that won’t join the party is Anthropic’s arch rival, with it emerging over the weekend that Altman had told Fortune OpenAI won’t go public this year “given everything happening with safety” in the current conversation.

“If there is a material shift out of AI do we see capital flow to other IPO candidates, like some of these deal in Europe?” noted the third banker. “That is the key question.”

Well, the European new listings pipeline is smaller, but interesting deals in the works include Leo Pharma, Eleda, Airtel Africa and Hotel Investment Partners, among others.

With most year-end IPO hopefuls not set to hit the road for at least another week or two, we are at a critical juncture.

Will bond market bearishness and AI doomerism combine to blow global IPO issuance off track in the last months of 2026? Or, like other fears this year, will they prove to be just another storm in a teacup?

We’ll find out soon enough.