Anthropic says its AI models pose ‘existential risk to humanity’ in leaked IPO filing: report

Anthropic says its AI models could pose a “catastrophic or existential risk to humanity” and can “resist shutdown,” according to an initial public offering prospectus obtained by Reuters. Anthropic is pursuing an IPO some time in the next year that many expect to value the five-year-old company at approximately $2 trillion. The company’s Wall Street debut will follow a June public offering by SpaceX, which owed much of its $2 trillion opening day valuation to its own AI efforts. OpenAI, the other leading American AI company, has announced plans for its own public offering. The Anthropic IPO could raise tens of billions of dollars for the cash-hungry company. But the company behind Claude also warned in the prospectus that its AI models can have “self-preserving behaviors” and have attempted to “conceal or manipulate information” and engaged in behavior “resembling blackmail” according to the report. The run of AI public offerings not only gives individual and institutional investors a chance to cash in on the AI boom, but also provides more transparency about their businesses. Yet the IPOs come amid growing concerns about AI’s advancement and capabilities. An AI agent from OpenAI, Anthropic’s chief rival, broke into an Australian healthcare database, the country’s prime minister revealed last week. OpenAI also disclosed Friday that its agents probed three US government websites without authorization, but in that case did not obtain non-public data. In a prospectus, companies typically offer investors lists of risks they face, such as lawsuits and competitive pressures, when laying out the case for investing in the company. But the hazards are never this stark. Anthropic dedicated 80 pages to its risk factors in the leaked prospectus, significantly more than the 48 pages it spent detailing its business, according to Reuters. Anthropic did not respond to a request for comment from CNN. The prospectus is likely to feed growing concerns about the risks posed to humanity by AI. Earlier this month, former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon received widespread attention when he left the company and posted on X that “the people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.” Anthropic is one of the leading companies in AI development, and its CEO Dario Amodei responded to Coxon’s post with a 3,800 word essay calling for a slowdown and guardrails on the development of AI. He also told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that he agreed with Coxon more than he disagreed. Amodei wrote in his essay that the risks are serious, even if the benefits could change humanity for the better. Some in the industry, however, including the CEO of Hugging Face, which was breached by OpenAI’s AI models when they acted without authorization during a test, believe the fears are overblown. President Donald Trump is set to meet with executives from the industry Tuesday, including Amodei, in a summit aimed at coming to a consensus in the industry. Trump has repeatedly resisted calls to regulate AI and has dismissed concerns as a “hoax.” AI giants need to raise a great amount of money to fund their costly development plans, and the massive amount of AI spending among big tech companies on computing infrastructure and talent has sent jitters through Wall Street. The leaked Anthropic IPO filing sheds light on its financials, revealing that the company lost $42 billion in 2025, according to Reuters. The company plans to spend $518 billion on cloud computing and infrastructure obligations in coming year, and said that nearly a quarter of its revenue last year came from two customers. Anthropic was last valued at $965 billion in May.