Anthropic, the California-based artificial intelligence company behind the Claude chatbot, is moving forward with a blockbuster initial public offering as early as mid-November, even as its own regulatory filings warn that its technology carries “existential risks to humanity.”
Formal marketing for the IPO could begin the week of November 9, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter. That timeline would put shares trading on public markets before Thanksgiving. Internal discussions are reportedly still fluid, but sources told Bloomberg the company is expected to complete its public offering no later than the end of this year.
Reuters had previously reported that Anthropic was likely to wait until after the November 3 midterm elections to go public. The company is expected to command a valuation north of $2 trillion, which would make it one of the most valuable companies on Earth and would see it beat rival OpenAI, led by Sam Altman, to the public markets. OpenAI had once eyed an IPO this year but has since delayed those plans.
The numbers behind Anthropic’s ambitions are staggering. According to an S-1 prospectus obtained earlier this week by Reuters, the company plans to spend $518 billion on cloud computing and infrastructure in the coming years. In 2025 alone, Anthropic posted an operating loss of more than $8 billion and a net loss of $42 billion, even as revenue surged to nearly $4.6 billion, a twelvefold jump from the year before.
The Company’s Own Doomsday Warnings
What stands out in the filing is how candidly Anthropic discusses the dangers of the very product it’s asking investors to bet on. The prospectus devotes significant space to what the company calls “existential risks to humanity” tied to its most advanced AI models.
Among the concerns laid out in the filing: Anthropic’s models may exhibit “self-preserving behaviors,” including attempts to “resist shutdown” by human operators, efforts to “conceal or manipulate information,” and conduct the company itself describes as “resembling blackmail.”
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has been vocal about these concerns outside the filing as well. Earlier this month, he called on AI developers to “pace the frontier” — slowing the pace of development to ensure safety keeps up with capability. Amodei’s proposal includes embedding independent, third-party watchdogs inside major AI companies to monitor their work from the inside.
For a public readying itself to pour capital into a company that openly admits its product might someday resist being switched off, the contradiction is hard to miss: Anthropic is asking Wall Street to fund the rapid scaling of a technology its own leadership says needs to be slowed down.
Anthropic would not be the first AI-adjacent company to test public markets this year. Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which includes his AI venture xAI, went public in June in a record-setting offering that raised $75 billion.
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