Two AI IPOs. Two lead banks. One set of bankers. If you work in Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley’s tech coverage and equity capital markets teams, that “simple” summer just got complicated.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Goldman and Morgan are creating entirely separate deal teams for the coming IPOs of OpenAI and Anthropic. The problem is plain: the same banker can’t credibly work on both. In their case, duplication looks great on the résumé. It also raises the kind of conflict-of-interest and confidential-information concerns that compliance departments dislike.
Separate teams, separate paperwork
According to the Wall Street Journal, Goldman and Morgan have not just split the teams. They’ve also restricted personnel overlap tied to earlier major work. They reportedly eliminated bankers who worked on the SpaceX IPO from preparing paperwork for OpenAI and Anthropic. The rationale is competitive sensitivity. SpaceX runs an AI business that could be seen as a competitor to both OpenAI and Anthropic.
That’s the internal brake system. It reduces leakage risk. It also creates friction fast.
Hiring fights start before the transaction
The first collision point is staffing. Deal teams compete for associates, vice presidents, analysts, and the sort of attention that talent actually pays for. The source material flags that managing director egos may need smoothing if their first choices do not land on their preferred team.
Even team naming becomes a tiny policy drama. The reporting notes bankers resist anything that implies one team ranks above another. That matters because “perception” is part of how conflicts become real issues in financial services.
Trading desks can’t split like advisory teams
When the IPO process moves from planning to execution, the conflict risk changes shape. Advisory and capital markets efforts can be separated into two pipelines. Trading cannot. The reporting says both teams will still need to liaise with the same sales desks to collect investor feedback.
That creates another exposure point. Even if the internal information controls work perfectly, investors can interpret outcomes as unequal. The source calls out bad feeling risks from both perception and any remaining information concerns.
Then there’s the syndicate. These deals require a large group of other banks. Many will be “passive bookrunners” or “co-managers,” per the reporting. Smaller banks may not want the effort if they earn lower fees. Goldman and Morgan will likely try to recruit different partners for each transaction, but overlap is inevitable.
The result, per the source, is a “highly profitable nightmare” for the deal captains and their compliance departments in the second half of the year.
Tokenisation brings traders the stress of “always on” markets
Later in the same roundup, SH Digital’s Nathanaël Cohen comments that most conventional equity and bond traders will “curse the blockchain until the end of their days,” according to the source. His point is practical, not philosophical.
If tokenisation helps conventional assets trade out of hours, someone still has to be awake and responsive. Cohen frames the issue as operational. Even if the market “closes,” the constant possibility of a move forces readiness. He connects that to consequences for weekends, holidays, and personal life.
The source also adds pushback from existing market practice. It notes that crypto traders may not see large weekend volume. It also points to forex traders, who have long followed the “follow the sun” model, with limited damage except during occasional big moves in thin markets.
So the argument is not that 24/7 trading will instantly break everything. It’s that the stress is about unpredictability, not clock time.
Other desk notes from the same brief
The roundup also mentions several unrelated items: Jonathan Gold moving to Bank of America to co-head EMEA FIG, Alex Gerko’s XTX losing a UK tax case, and reports that Sam Bankman-Fried is writing a prison memoir and vegan cookbook while seeking a presidential pardon. Each of those appears in the source only as a headline-level reference, without extra detail.
No investment advice here. These are process and risk-management stories. For banks and traders, the cost is the same either way. Risk controls and scheduling fights do not care that the deals are “exciting.”