Anthropic has warned that artificial intelligence could pose "catastrophic or existential risks to humanity" in regulatory filings unveiling details of its blockbuster planned US stock listing, days after the Claude maker said it would trade on the Nasdaq under the ticker ANT. The company's expected valuation would exceed that of SpaceX, which set the record for the biggest-ever listing at an initial valuation of roughly $1.8 trillion earlier this year.
Anthropic has not yet disclosed how many shares it plans to release, their price range, or a listing date. The company reported $16.3bn in revenue for the first half of the year, alongside losses of more than $80.7bn, as it races to build ever-larger AI models. It would be the first fully AI-focused company to go public, making the listing a test case for how Wall Street prices the industry's enormous spending against its still-unproven returns.
'Bold but Sane'
In the filing, Anthropic said advanced AI systems "could, if not developed, deployed, and operated with appropriate safeguards, oversight, and security measures, pose catastrophic or existential risks to humanity, particularly if such systems were misused, replicated, weaponised, or allowed to operate with a high degree of autonomy." Across roughly 90 pages of risk disclosures, the company also flagged its dependence on a small cluster of cloud providers and Taiwanese chipmakers, and warned of potential regulatory liability tied to harms involving children or people at risk of suicide.
Even so, the filing leaned heavily on AI's promise, describing a future of "millions of virtual agents with the ability to revolutionise every area of human endeavour" and predicting AI could help "profoundly accelerate the rate of progress in biology and medicine," including toward cures for cancer and Alzheimer's. "We believe that AI is one of the most consequential technologies in human history," the company said, adding that it would continue making forward investments "that may seem irresponsibly large at first glance," aiming to be "bold but sane."
Matt Orton, chief market strategist at Raymond James Investment, said investors already expect rapid growth alongside rapid losses from Anthropic, so the scale of the deficits in Monday's filing was unlikely to surprise the market. The listing comes as rival OpenAI, which announced its own IPO plans shortly after Anthropic's in June, is now expected to go public early next year, and as both companies have faced a wave of security incidents involving semi-autonomous AI agents — underscoring, critics say, exactly the kind of risk Anthropic's own filing describes.