Anthropic walks tightrope to Nasdaq, pushing for a slowdown while pursuing $2 trillion valuation

Dario Amodei, co-founder and chief executive officer of Anthropic, during an interview on "The Circuit with Emily Chang" at Anthropic's headquarters in San Francisco, California, US, on Thursday, April 30, 2026. Jason Henry | Bloomberg | Getty ImagesAnthropic's road to an IPO just got a lot bumpier.While the Claude creator meets with prospective investors ahead of its potentially historic debut, co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei is pushing a concept that would seem to contradict those ambitious efforts: a slowdown. Anthropic, valued at $965 billion earlier this year, confidentially filed its IPO prospectus in June, and has been widely expected to list its shares as soon as next month. Meanwhile, concerns about the power of advanced AI models has been intensifying for weeks, spilling into the mainstream as more researchers warn of potential threats of human extinction. With that backdrop, Amodei wrote an essay over the weekend urging the AI industry to slow the pace of model development, proposing a three-step plan to temper how quickly model capabilities improve without "sacrificing commercial advantage or the United States' lead in AI." It's the latest challenge facing public market...