Anthropic Warns AI Poses 'Catastrophic' Risks as It Files for Stock Listing

Anthropic has warned that artificial intelligence could pose "catastrophic or existential risks to humanity," a caution included in the company's filing for a US stock market listing.

The Claude chatbot developer said advanced AI systems could pose such risks "particularly if such systems were misused, replicated, weaponised, or allowed to operate with a high degree of autonomy," unless developed and deployed with proper safeguards, oversight and security.

The filing disclosed losses exceeding $80.7bn for the first half of the year against revenues of $16.3bn, alongside $112.4bn in cash or equivalents. The company did not reveal share numbers, pricing or a listing date, but said it will trade on the Nasdaq under the symbol ANT.

Anthropic, founded five years ago by chief executive Dario Amodei, his sister Daniela Amodei and five other co-founders, announced in June its intention to go public. Rival OpenAI has since said it also intends to list.

The company said it would aim to be "bold but sane" in its forward investments, which it acknowledged "may seem irresponsibly large at first glance," and to win trust "with a track record of successful bets."

Among roughly 90 pages of risk factors, Anthropic cited reliance on a small group of cloud providers, Taiwanese chipmakers facing heavy demand, and data centres concentrated in the US. It also flagged potential "regulatory action arising from harms associated with our AI models" and uncertainty over liability for its systems' actions.

Peter Andersen of Andersen Capital Management told Reuters the listing plan was "a significant milestone in the development of artificial intelligence," adding that its outcome would be "fairly indicative of the sentiment" among investors toward funding AI development.

Source: BBC News