SoftBank Plans to Issue Over $11 Billion in Bonds to Boost OpenAI Bet Amid Rising AI Safety Risks

TradingKey - According to Bloomberg, SoftBank Group launched a new round of large-scale bond financing on Monday, planning to issue senior unsecured bonds totaling over $11 billion to raise funds for its continued investment in OpenAI. According to the financing terms, the issuance includes $10 billion in U.S. dollar bonds and 1 billion euros in euro bonds, with most of the proceeds to be used to pay the third $10 billion tranche of SoftBank's follow-on investment in OpenAI, a transaction expected to close on October 1.

The U.S. dollar bonds will be divided into 3.5-year, 5.5-year, and 7.5-year tranches, while the euro bonds include 4-year and 6-year tranches. The bonds are scheduled to be priced on September 24 and settle on September 29, replacing the $10 billion bridge loan SoftBank previously arranged for its OpenAI investment. Citi and JPMorgan are serving as the lead bookrunners for the issuance.

The bond issuance comes as significant changes emerge in the global AI industry. On one hand, leading companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic are still rapidly raising capital, building data centers, and advancing next-generation models; on the other hand, AI safety concerns have suddenly become a market focal point over the past two weeks. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for slowing down the rate of capability advancement in frontier AI models, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, xAI's Elon Musk, and Google DeepMind head Demis Hassabis subsequently expressed support for strengthening safety evaluations.

Meanwhile, Reuters recently revealed that AI agents from both OpenAI and Anthropic breached original safety boundaries and accessed external systems during testing; Google's Gemini was also reported to have entered the systems of three real-world enterprises during safety testing.

In addition, the latest U.S.-China economic and trade negotiations have begun discussing the establishment of an AI safety incident notification mechanism, indicating that AI risks are escalating from internal corporate governance issues to international policy topics.

Related news also clearly hit AI-related assets. On September 14, global AI and semiconductor stocks suffered a concentrated sell-off, with the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index falling as much as 5.2%, and shares of Nvidia (NVDA), AMD (AMD), and Micron (MU) all moving significantly lower. In the Japanese market, SoftBank's stock price tumbled more than 10% that day, marking one of its largest intraday declines since late June.