The Social Capital founder who spent the SPAC boom championing companies onto public markets is now boosting a campaign to keep the biggest artificial intelligence listing off of them. On September 15, 2026, Chamath Palihapitiya quote-posted a call to stop the Anthropic IPO with the three-word caption “Some are saying”, an amplification that reached roughly 35,000 impressions and drew 799 likes and 95 retweets within hours of posting.
The amplification built on earlier commentary. Four nights earlier on the All-In podcast, Palihapitiya compared Anthropic’s IPO plans to a tobacco giant taking a lethal product public. “It’s almost like Philip Morris where it’s like, we know that the cigarettes are bad for you, we know that the cigarettes will kill you and we’re going to say it, but we’re not going to disclose it yet. We’re going to take the company public,” he said on the September 11, 2026 episode. His argument, expanded in the segment, is that Anthropic employees who publicly co-sign extinction-risk warnings create product liability exposure and IPO complications the underwriters cannot ignore.
Awkward Timing for a SPAC Veteran
Palihapitiya’s own biography markets him as the Social Capital founder who claimed to have had better returns than Warren Buffett and became a vocal personality with the growth of SPACs in 2020 and 2021. That track record includes several de-SPAC deals that public investors would rather forget.
Take ProKidney (NASDAQ:PROK), the clinical-stage kidney cell therapy company Palihapitiya brought public through Social Capital Suvretta Holdings Corp. III. SEC filings show he sold 7,256,367 Class A ordinary shares at $1.31 on November 21, 2023. PROK trades at $1.76 today, down 79.61% from its post-merger levels. The company carries an accumulated deficit of approximately $1.3 billion, burned $36.09 million in R&D last quarter, and flags possible Nasdaq delisting in its risk factors. Its pivotal PROACT 1 readout is not expected until the second quarter of 2027, per the company’s most recent 8-K exhibit.
Akili, another Social Capital Suvretta vehicle, ended worse. Palihapitiya disposed of 13,773,000 common shares on July 5, 2024, leaving zero shares owned.
Still Buying Into Blank Checks
Even while sounding the alarm on Anthropic’s disclosure risk, Palihapitiya has been signing up as an insider at fresh acquisition vehicles. On October 1, 2025, he acquired 175,000 Class A shares of American Exceptionalism Acquisition Corp. A at $10 per share. On February 3, 2026, he filed a Form 3 as an insider of Colombier Acquisition Corp. III, a sister vehicle to Colombier Acquisition II (NYSE:CLBR), the roughly $366 million blank-check company still hunting for a merger target.
Blank-check companies exist for one purpose: putting private businesses in front of public investors.
Fairness and What to Watch
To be fair, Palihapitiya only amplified the anti-IPO post, attaching the three-word caption “Some are saying” to a DataRepublican tweet that framed the Anthropic listing as an “AI safety” concern and warned that “EA people” will “cash in their billions”. Hours earlier the same morning, he praised Elon Musk’s peer-review proposal for frontier labs as “infinitely better than some transnational governance body to decide on humanity’s future”, suggesting his objection is to the disclosure framework rather than to AI going public at all.
For investors, the read-through matters for one important reason. If Palihapitiya’s Philip Morris analogy gains traction with plaintiffs’ lawyers or the SEC’s disclosure staff, every frontier-lab S-1 will need to reconcile employee doomsday statements with risk factor language.