Anthropic warns about existential threats to humanity in IPO document

Anthropic has told prospective investors that advanced AI could bring “catastrophic or existential risks to humanity,” a disclosure buried within an unpublished IPO prospectus, coming as the Claude AI creator chases a valuation above $2 trillion, according to Reuters.

Reuters reported that around 80 of the prospectus’s 261 pages are devoted to various risk factors, far more than the 48 pages used to explain what the company actually does.

Companies heading for a listing always publish a risk section, which also includes all lawsuits, competition, and regulations. What they almost never do is let shareholders know that their own product could potentially contribute to human extinction. Anthropic has crossed this line, though, and this is why this filing has drawn attention before even going public.

Behaviors Anthropic’s IPO filing mentions

The prospectus is unusually direct about the risks, warning that AI models could develop “self-preserving behaviors,” including attempts to “resist shutdown,” “conceal or manipulate information,” or engage in conduct “resembling blackmail.”

There is another admission that goes to the heart of AI safety testing. Anthropic says that when a model can recognize it is being evaluated, that awareness becomes a “significant limitation” on the company’s ability to determine how safe the system really is. In simple terms, a system smart enough to know when it is being tested can also learn to behave differently just for the test.

Money flowing out faster than in

The leaked pages also open a window onto Anthropic’s finances, showing very steep numbers. Reuters has reported that the company lost $42 billion in 2025.

Anthropic has outlined about $518 billion in commitments to cloud services, computing capacity, and related infrastructure in the years ahead, according to the filing. The company generated $11.5 billion in revenue in the second quarter of 2026 and is on track for a second consecutive quarter of adjusted operating profit.

Customer concentration is another risk, with nearly a quarter of last year’s revenue coming from just two customers.

An IPO arriving mid-panic

Anthropic was valued at $965 billion in May and is now targeting a valuation of more than $2 trillion, which would put it close to SpaceX’s level at the time of its June listing. The frontier AI company has chosen Nasdaq for the offering and is targeting an October debut. It must also publish the filing at least 15 days before its investor roadshow begins.

Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned after writing that people building AI “earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” the Guardian reported. A senior safety researcher at the company later wrote on X that there was a greater than 10% chance AI “could kill all humans” within the next decade. CEO Dario Amodei then published an essay calling for the industry to slow down and told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that he agreed with Coxon more than he disagreed.

Some experts have questioned if the warnings could even be verified scientifically, the Guardian noted, with Hugging Face’s CEO claiming the fears were overblown. OpenAI, meanwhile, scrapped the planned release of its GPT-6.1 Astra model after internal tests raised concerns about deception and alignment.

Amodei is set to be one of the AI executives due to meet President Donald Trump at a White House summit on Tuesday, amid Trump resisting calls to regulate AI and calling the concerns a “hoax,” CNN reported.

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