Special purpose vehicles, or SPVs, enable investors to pool their money into funding a one-off deal. These mechanisms, which have been around for decades, have been surging in popularity as retail investors scramble for scraps of shares in hot companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Anduril, and Perplexity. Many are perfectly legitimate, but some have sky-high fees, opaque structures, and complicated layers of middlemen. Critics warn that in the frenzy to claim a piece of AI's trillion-dollar promise,...