Anthropic plans to caution potential investors in its IPO that advanced AI could pose “catastrophic or existential risks to humanity,” an extraordinary warning by a company seeking to profit from the same technology.
The company’s IPO prospectus, reviewed by Reuters, highlights risks associated with its AI models, which it said could exhibit “self-preserving behaviors,” including attempts to “resist shutdown,” to “conceal or manipulate information” and behavior “resembling blackmail.”
The company devoted roughly 80 pages of the 261-page main body of its prospectus to laying out risk factors, nearly twice the 48 pages it used to describe its business. For comparison, SpaceX dedicated just around 38 of the 277-page main body of its prospectus to risk factors.
“Potential model awareness of our evaluation efforts creates a significant limitation on our ability to assess model safety,” Anthropic said in the filing.
Anthropic safety researcher Evan Hubinger estimated a greater than 10% probability that AI could kill humans within the next decade.
Despite emphasizing AI safety, Anthropic said that returns on its safety investments are unclear. About 6% of computing power used for AI research went to safety work in a sample week in July.
Financial disclosures in the filing show revenue growth exceeding 1,000% in 2025 to approximately 42 billion and planned infrastructure commitments exceeding $500 billion.