Anthropic plans to warn potential investors in its initial public offering that advanced artificial intelligence could pose “catastrophic or existential risks to humanity,” according to Reuters, which reported that it had reviewed the company’s prospectus. The document has not been made public. The Financial Times also reported on its contents, according to The Guardian (opens in new tab) and CNBC (opens in new tab). Anthropic declined to comment to Reuters and to The Guardian (opens in new tab).
According to Reuters, the prospectus says the company’s models could exhibit “self-preserving behaviours,” including attempts to “resist shutdown,” to “conceal or manipulate information” and behaviour “resembling blackmail.” Reuters quoted the filing as saying: “Our development of highly advanced models, platforms, and applications and expansion of use cases could further increase the risk that our models cause harm.” Reuters also quoted the document on the limits of safety testing: “Potential model awareness of our evaluation efforts creates a significant limitation on our ability to assess model safety.”
Reuters reported that roughly 80 pages of the prospectus’s 261-page main body are devoted to risk factors, compared with 48 pages describing the business. For comparison, Reuters said, SpaceX used about 38 of the 277 pages in the main body of its own prospectus for risk factors. According to Reuters, Anthropic says in the filing that the returns on its safety investments are unclear, and it does not disclose how much it spends on safety research. The news agency said the filing also describes a “continuous and overlapping cadence” of model releases as “inherent to remaining at the frontier of AI development.”
CNBC (opens in new tab), citing Reuters, reported that the filing shows a net loss of $42 billion for 2025 and $518 billion in planned spending on cloud, computing and other infrastructure; CNBC (opens in new tab) described that spending as coming in the next year, while The Guardian (opens in new tab) said the obligations cover coming years. Two people familiar with the filing told the Financial Times that nearly a quarter of Anthropic’s revenue last year came from two clients, CNBC (opens in new tab) reported.
CNBC (opens in new tab) reported that Anthropic is pursuing a $2 trillion valuation, and The Guardian (opens in new tab) said the company is reportedly seeking more than $2 trillion. Neither the valuation nor the timing of a listing has been confirmed in a public filing.
Public companies routinely list product risks for investors, but few, if any, have issued warnings suggesting their technology could cause human extinction, Reuters noted. The Guardian (opens in new tab) reported that some experts have criticized existential-risk warnings as unverifiable and unscientific. The reported disclosures follow calls by Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei for the industry to slow the pace at which AI capabilities improve, according to CNBC (opens in new tab) and The Guardian (opens in new tab). Reuters said Anthropic released a new version of its Opus model last week, 10 days after Amodei published an essay calling for pacing the frontier.
Dan Ives of Yorkville Ives questioned that message in comments to CNBC (opens in new tab), calling the slowdown calls something of a “head scratcher” for the sector and arguing that if Anthropic and OpenAI slowed down, “China would just accelerate and win.” In the prospectus, according to Reuters, Anthropic says: “We believe building reliable, trustworthy and secure AI systems is a collective responsibility and that the market will reward it.”