There is an old rule in technology investing that the surest way to make money from a gold rush is to sell shovels. In 2026, the shovel appears to be a fleece hoodie with a small logo on the chest, and Australians are among those willing to pay a premium for a used one.
The world’s most valuable artificial intelligence companies remain stubbornly out of reach for ordinary buyers. OpenAI and Anthropic are both privately held, their shares locked up among staff, founders and a short list of institutional backers with the connections to get an allocation. There is no ticker to punch into a brokerage app, no initial public offering to queue for, and no easy way for a curious punter in Parramatta or Prahran to own a sliver of the businesses reshaping their working lives. So a growing number of people are settling for the next best thing, which is the branded clothing.
As Forbes Australia reported, a lively resale trade has sprung up for the sweatshirts, caps and tote bags that these companies hand out at conferences, hackathons and to their own staff. Listings for second-hand OpenAI and Anthropic gear have appeared on eBay and other resale platforms at prices that would make a department store blush, with used sweatshirts changing hands for around $250. The clothing itself is unremarkable. What buyers are really paying for is proximity, or at least the appearance of it.
Cosplaying closeness to the money machine
The appeal is easy enough to understand once you strip away the price tag. Wearing a piece of official OpenAI or Anthropic merchandise is a signal, and in certain circles it is a valuable one. It suggests you were in the room, that you got an invite to the hackathon, that you know someone on the inside, or that you at least move in the world where those things happen. In a labour market where fluency with these tools has become a genuine career advantage, looking like an insider carries real social weight.
This is not a new phenomenon so much as a familiar one wearing new colours. Silicon Valley has long treated company swag as a status currency, with the rarest items functioning like membership badges for a club that most people cannot join. What has changed is the intensity of the demand and the eye-watering valuations sitting behind the logos. When a company is worth hundreds of billions of dollars on paper yet offers no way for the public to buy in, the merchandise becomes one of the very few tangible objects a fan can actually own. Scarcity does the rest.
Sceptics see something less flattering in the trend. To them, a resale market for used hoodies is a textbook sign of froth, the kind of behaviour that tends to cluster near the top of a hype cycle rather than the bottom. When people are paying $250 to dress like they work at a company they have no financial stake in, the argument goes, the enthusiasm has clearly outrun the fundamentals. Others take a gentler view and treat it as harmless fandom, no stranger than paying over the odds for a vintage band shirt or a limited-run pair of sneakers. The logo is the point, and the logo is doing its job.
What it says about who gets access
Underneath the novelty sits a more serious question about access, and here the Australian angle sharpens. The reason the swag market exists at all is that the equity market does not. These companies have stayed private far longer than the tech giants of previous generations, raising enormous sums from venture funds, sovereign wealth vehicles and strategic partners while the general public watches from the sidelines. The upside, if there is upside, is being captured by a narrow group before anyone else gets a look in.
For Australians that dynamic is more pronounced than for their American counterparts. A software engineer in San Francisco might at least attend the events where this clothing is handed out, or know colleagues who hold shares. In Sydney, Melbourne or Perth, the distance is both geographic and financial. Local superannuation funds have exposure to some of these names through offshore private-market allocations, but that is a diffuse and indirect stake that does nothing for the individual who simply wants a piece of the story. The hoodie, oddly, is one of the few assets an ordinary Australian can buy directly.
It also lands at a moment when the country is wrestling with exactly this sense of being a customer rather than an owner. FluentSea has spent months tracking the debate over whether Australia is building artificial intelligence or merely hosting and consuming it, from data centre land grabs to the push for sovereign capability. A brisk trade in imported American merchandise is a small and slightly comic data point in that larger picture, but it points the same way. The value is being created elsewhere, and Australians are paying retail, or in this case well above retail, to feel connected to it.
What happens next
Whether the swag boom endures probably depends on the thing the buyers cannot have, which is equity. If OpenAI, Anthropic or their rivals eventually list on public markets, the hoodie loses some of its magic, because the fandom will have a more direct outlet in actual shares. Until then, the resale listings are likely to keep climbing, tracking the valuations and the hype more faithfully than any official metric.
There is a wry lesson in all of it for anyone watching the AI economy from Australia. The companies at the centre of this cycle have made their tools astonishingly accessible, available to almost anyone with a browser and a subscription. Ownership of the companies themselves has moved in the opposite direction, becoming more exclusive as the products become more universal. For now, the closest most people will get is a $250 second-hand sweatshirt, worn as a small act of aspiration and, perhaps, a quiet protest at being locked out of the room.
Sources: Forbes Australia.
