Anthropic warns investors of AI’s 'existential risk to humanity' in IPO prospectus, reports say

An Anthropic logo is displayed at Moscone Center during the Dreamforce 2026 technology summit in San Francisco, California, US, September 17, 2026.Carlos Barria | ReutersAnthropic plans to warn speculative investors in its IPO prospectus that its AI models pose a "catastrophic or existential risk to humanity," several reports said on Tuesday. The company, which is gearing up for a much-anticipated IPO, dedicated over a third of its IPO filing, or around 80 of 261 pages, to laying out the potential risks of the technology it's developing and is seeking investment for, according to a report from Reuters. It only used 48 pages to discuss its actual business. The five-year-old company, known for its frontier language model Claude, warned that AI can have "self-preserving behaviors," including being able to "resist shutdown," "conceal or manipulate information," and carry out behaviors "resembling blackmail," per the Reuters report. The company is pursuing a $2 trillion valuation when it goes public and reported in the filing that it made a net loss of $42 billion in 2025. It's planning to spend $518 billion on cloud, computing, and other infrastructure in the coming year, according to ...