Anthropic and OpenAI just got a $25B competitor — and it's offering its AI model for free. Is your 401(k) at risk? Kit Pulliam Wed, October 7, 2026 at 10:30 AM EDT 4 min read ANTH.PVT ^GSPC -0.67% OPAI.PVT The S&P 500 is booming, largely thanks to AI stocks. But a new AI startup is threatening to topple some of the biggest AI giants in the industry.
The startup Reflection recently announced Beam, which it calls a "powerful workhorse model for enterprise coding and agentic workloads." It claims that the model's performance is comparable to powerful open-weight model GLM-5.2 — but at greater efficiency.
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What's more, Beam is set to be open-weight as well, making it possible for people to run it for free on their own computers.
Here's what Beam's designed for, as well as how it might indirectly impact your retirement savings.
Beam is designed for use in the workplace, helping people vibe code and handling multi-step tasks with little human intervention.
Right now, many of the best-performing AI models for coding are closed weight, meaning you can't just download them for personal use on your own computer. For instance, different models of Claude, Gemini and GPT make up eight of the top-ten-ranked models on SWE-bench, which ranks models based on their ability to handle real-world coding tasks.
Both of the open-weight models — MiniMax M2.5 and GLM 5 — are Chinese models. If Beam is as good as Reflection claims, it could be the first U.S.-developed open-weight model to make SWE-bench's top 10.
If Beam catches on, this could be a significant blow to Anthropic and OpenAI. The timing is especially terrible for Anthropic, which is planning its IPO in November. Reflection says it will release Beam's weights, along with documentation, later this month.
OpenAI is also planning on becoming a public company soon, although its timing is not as definite as Anthropic's.
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As long as the S&P 500 is over-reliant on AI stocks performing well, there are some risks to your portfolio when AI companies do poorly.
If that fact concerns you, then now's a great time to check in on your 401(k). Are you currently in an S&P 500 index fund? If so, it might be a good idea to diversify your portfolio into different asset classes so you aren't overexposed.
The good news is that you actually stand to gain from Reflection's potential rise to prominence. Reflection is backed by Nvidia, one of the biggest publicly owned AI companies.
And since OpenAI and Anthropic are still privately held — at least for now — you don't have to worry about their stocks tanking the market if they start performing poorly.
There are still risks, of course. Gemini owner Alphabet is a major player in the S&P 500, and other AI giants like Microsoft or Tesla could also lose market valuation if Beam outcompetes their current offerings.
That's why it's still important to diversify your retirement account if you're currently overinvested in AI; it might be performing well now, but you don't want to find your retirement funds decimated after a surprise downturn.
Reflection did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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This article originally appeared on Moneywise.com under the title: Anthropic and OpenAI just got a $25B competitor — and it's offering its AI model for free. Is your 401(k) at risk?
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