Kraken lets you bet on OpenAI and Anthropic with leverage before there is any stock to buy

By crypto.news · September 6, 2026.

Kraken has launched two perpetual futures contracts —derivatives with no expiration date— tracking the private valuations of OpenAI and Anthropic. The products, with the tickers PF_OPENAIXUSD and PF_ANTHROPICXUSD, allow long or short positions with up to 5x leverage and settle in dollars. The exchange first announced them in June and again promoted the Anthropic contract on September 6, according to its own official account.

The first thing to make clear, and which Kraken acknowledges in its own documentation, is what these contracts are NOT: shares. Buying the Anthropic contract does not put anyone on the company's shareholder register, carries no voting rights, pays no dividends, gives no access to corporate information and grants no guaranteed allocation if the company goes public. Kraken also stresses that it has no affiliation with, sponsorship from or endorsement by OpenAI or Anthropic. It is, in essence, a bet on where the market believes a valuation will move, wrapped in the mechanics of a crypto derivative.

The underlying technical problem is the price reference. A futures contract on listed shares uses the stock market price as an external anchor; here that anchor does not exist, because neither OpenAI nor Anthropic is publicly traded. Kraken solves this with what it calls the «Kraken PreMarket Synthetic index», an index that draws not on an independent stock market but on the futures market's own activity, smoothed with an exponential average. It is, to put it bluntly, a price that references itself: if traders collectively undervalue or overvalue one of the two companies, there is no liquid market in real shares to correct that deviation through arbitrage. The article itself recalls that similar contracts on Anthropic on other platforms fell as much as 9% after new exchanges were added, proof of how thin this layer of liquidity is.

The risk mechanics add further layers. The maximum 5x leverage falls as the position grows (to roughly 2x in the highest tiers), the base maintenance margin is 10% and there are funding payments every hour. Kraken describes that funding as «structurally minimal» as long as the price stays within a 0.25% band around its own synthetic index; that is the company's own assessment, not a guarantee, and it can change if liquidity or market positioning shifts. There is also auto-deleveraging risk (the forced reduction of winning positions when the exchange cannot match the liquidated counterparty in the order book), and Kraken expressly warns that a customer can lose their entire margin, or even more.

Access is deliberately restricted: the contracts are not available to customers in the United States, the European Economic Area, Canada, Australia or New Zealand, and in the United Kingdom only to professional clients. They are offered by Payward Digital Solutions from Bermuda, under a license from the Bermuda Monetary Authority, separate from the regulated derivatives products Kraken operates in the US. Coinbase, Hyperliquid and other specialized platforms have launched equivalent products outside the United States, and the sector has already formally asked the SEC for a specific regulatory framework for these pre-IPO futures. If OpenAI or Anthropic ultimately complete a stock market listing, Kraken will replace the synthetic index with one based on its xStocks product (tokenized shares backed by real listed securities), and warns that margins, position limits and funding «are expected to change»; if the IPO does not arrive or a reliable price cannot be obtained, it reserves the right to settle the contract unilaterally.

Our reading: this is not a signal about the technical progress of OpenAI or Anthropic, but about the market's appetite for exposure to them without any legitimate way of getting it. Both companies have deliberately chosen to stay private —raising multibillion-dollar rounds without opening their capital to the stock market—, and that opacity is precisely what creates the vacuum Kraken fills with a synthetic, leveraged instrument domiciled in Bermuda to sidestep US and EU regulators. The fact that those two markets, the world's largest, have been expressly excluded from the product is no accident: it is the financial sector itself acknowledging, in practice, that this instrument would not pass today the retail investor protection scrutiny those jurisdictions do apply.

Here it is worth applying the same criterion we use to separate demonstrated capability from narrative when it comes to AI models: a perpetual future on a private valuation does not measure the real value of Anthropic or OpenAI, it measures how much some traders are willing to bet on what other traders believe the company is worth, in a circuit that feeds on itself with no external anchor. The SpaceX precedent cited in the article itself is telling: the synthetic contracts converged with the real price only when the IPO finally provided a verifiable reference. Until that happens with OpenAI or Anthropic —if it happens—, any sharp move in these futures says more about crypto speculative sentiment than about the underlying business. The real test of whether these two companies' generative AI produces the value it promises will come with audited accounts and a real share price, not with an index calculated from the bets of those already betting.