AI Quarterly Q3 2026
What changed in AI this quarter and what it means for private equity
The AI Industry Quarterly is ToltIQ’s review of the quarter’s developments in AI and what they mean for private equity. The Q3 edition covers how AI assets changed hands, model pricing, capital flows, infrastructure, policy and enterprise adoption.
This quarter’s feature, Liquidity Without Listings, asks what an AI asset is really worth when it changes hands without an IPO. A funding round, a tender, a secondary trade and an acquisition offer can put four different prices on the same company, and the feature shows where those gaps opened in Q3, closing with three questions diligence teams should ask before relying on any of them.
Highlights from the quarter:
AI exits ran through acquirers. SpaceX’s $60 billion purchase of Cursor made up more than half of US venture exit value, and none of the quarter’s 18 US venture-backed IPOs was an AI company.
Secondaries split by vintage. Secondary prices for the frontier labs ran ahead of their primary rounds, while companies last priced in 2021 traded at a median 59% discount.
LP exposure concentrated. OpenAI and Anthropic took 43% of global venture funding in the first half and make up roughly a third of the value of US unicorns.
Model pricing split by tier. OpenAI launched GPT-6 Astra at a $10/$50 premium tier as Anthropic cut Opus 5.5’s price by 20%.
Capex kept rising. Big-four capital spending guidance reached about $732.5 billion for 2026.
Download the full Q3 2026 AI Industry Quarterly for all of the details.
Share this article
