Zusammenfassung:
Between 2021 and 2026 the artificial intelligence investment cycle reshaped venture capital, but whether AI labels command higher start-up offering sizes remains contested. Using the SEC Form D regulatory record across nine non-consecutive quarters (2021Q2-2026Q1; 130,057 deduplicated filings and 71,702 declared offerings above USD 10,000), we estimate hedonic offering-size regressions. The corrected specification does not confirm a positive post-2022 AI premium and does not rule out small-to-moderate premiums: the AI × post-2022 interaction is -0.0029 (robust standard error 0.1740; 95% confidence interval -0.344 to +0.338; p = 0.9867), and none of five specifications is positive and significant. The apparent divergence is a right-tail phenomenon: in 2026 the mean AI offering is 2.31× the non-AI mean (bootstrap 95% confidence interval 0.25-7.94, including 1), while an exploratory rank-shift test is significant (p = 0.018, sensitive to classifier breadth); the median AI offering is smaller (0.70×) and the mean ratio falls to 0.93× under 1/99 winsorization. Overall top-1% capital concentration fell from 92.88% in 2021 to 59.11% in 2026 even as the largest AI rounds grew. We read the cycle as capital intensity plus extreme right-tail concentration in a few frontier financings, not a broad-based AI premium.
