Anthropic warns of ‘existential risks to humanity’ in IPO prospectus

Anthropic has formally warned investors that its technology may pose “existential risks to humanity” in a long-awaited IPO prospectus circulated with a small group of partners in recent days. The nearly $1tn AI start-up led by Dario Amodei devoted almost a third of its lengthy S-1 to “risk factors”, including advanced models that could manipulate, blackmail and exhibit other unpredictable behaviours. People familiar with the filing say it also flags extreme customer concentration — close to a quarter of last year’s revenue from just two clients. Those disclosures complicate valuing what is expected to be the most highly valued IPO of all time, with a Nasdaq listing eyed this autumn. On economics: Anthropic told investors it plans to spend $518bn on cloud, computing and infrastructure obligations in coming years; last year it recorded an operating loss of more than $8bn as revenue jumped 12-fold to almost $4.6bn while operating expenses hit almost $13bn. Backers remain confident of listing above $2tn — more than double the May funding-round level and beyond SpaceX’s $1.78tn June debut — citing growth. Counterweights in the same filing/reporting: Q2 revenue was $11.5bn and the company is on course for a second consecutive quarter of operating profit on an adjusted basis; compute deals include Google, SpaceX and smaller partners. Safety politics form the backdrop: Amodei’s UN Security Council warning and “pacing the frontier” push (Altman and Musk backing co-operation); recent agent cyber breaches; OpenAI on Monday scrapping its newest-model release citing safety. Financial/governance details were first reported by Reuters and confirmed to the FT by multiple people who have seen the filing; Anthropic declined to comment.