AI giants are quiet on climate in sign of post-ESG Wall Street
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OpenAI and Anthropic are heading toward IPOs without climate disclosures. That’s a sharp break from the old Wall Street script, and California may force the issue soon.
Based on reporting by Fortune, Bloomberg — read the original for the full story.
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OpenAI and Anthropic are heading toward public listings with a conspicuous gap in their paper trail: no greenhouse gas totals, no net-zero pledge, no sustainability report. Anthropic has joined a carbon-removal coalition called Frontier, but that is not the same thing as laying out a full climate footprint. For companies now valued in near-trillion-dollar territory, the silence stands out.
A few years ago, that kind of omission would have triggered a backlash. Even ExxonMobil has been publishing sustainability reports for years, and the big public cloud and AI infrastructure players — Google, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft — all have net-zero goals and disclose emissions that are rising with the data-center buildout. Now the mood has shifted. Climate-focused investors are quieter, US regulators have pulled back, and the public is left guessing how much pollution sits behind large language models and the data centers that run them.
The scale is the unsettling part. Precise figures are missing, but the source material points to very large emissions, and a study from the Environmental Integrity Project says new gas plants for US data centers could soon produce as much climate pollution as all of Australia. That is a lot of hidden smoke for a sector that still likes to call itself startup land.
California may change the tone. SB253 starts taking effect in November and will require companies with more than $1 billion in revenue that do business in the state to report Scope 1 and 2 emissions, including emissions outside California. Anthropic says it is working with Watershed to measure its company-wide footprint. OpenAI says it is coordinating with data center partners and has a sustainability steering committee. SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment.
The catch is that the accounting itself is messy. There is no standard way yet to measure emissions from training a large model or to assign embodied carbon in AI hardware, and some of the biggest numbers may not show up until later. California’s Scope 3 rules are expected in 2027, the EU’s reporting regime by 2029, though both timelines have already slipped. For now, the AI boom is growing faster than the disclosure rules built to track it.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is what post-ESG Wall Street looks like: huge companies, huge power, and a sudden allergy to numbers that might make the spreadsheet look ugly. The old “just ask nicely and maybe publish a report” era is dead, and it took a political backlash and a few trillion dollars in AI excitement to kill it. If regulators won’t force disclosure, the sector will keep pretending the smoke came from somewhere else.
Read more about this at: Fortune
