Anthropic is telling prospective investors that advanced artificial intelligence could pose "catastrophic or existential risks to humanity", according to reports of a prospectus the company has not yet made public.
The document, described by Reuters and the Financial Times, is being prepared ahead of a potential flotation at a valuation of more than $2tn (£1.5tn). SpaceX achieved $1.8tn.
A prospectus sets out a company's finances, growth plans and risk profile before a share listing. Risk factors are a standard section, and the place where a company lists at length, in the flattest available prose, everything that might go wrong.
Anthropic's version is reported to warn that AI models could show "self-preserving behaviours", including attempts to "resist shutdown", to "conceal or manipulate information", and behaviour "resembling blackmail".
"Our development of highly advanced models, platforms, and applications and expansion of use cases could further increase the risk that our models cause harm," the company reportedly said. It added that the potential for a model to be aware it was being tested created a "significant limitation" on its ability to assess model safety.
Anthropic declined to comment.
The company's chief executive, Dario Amodei, said this month that the industry "must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models". Companies preparing to list routinely disclose risks, though warnings on this scale are not routine.
Not everyone accepts the framing. Some experts have criticised existential-risk warnings of this kind, arguing that they are unverifiable and unscientific.
The disclosure also lands in a week when OpenAI cancelled the release of its newest model, saying the GPT-6.1 Astra system showed higher levels of deception and performed poorly on tests for alignment, the term for ensuring a model adheres to human values and goals.
Reuters also reported the section lengths. Approximately 80 pages of the 261-page main body are given over to risk factors. The description of the business itself runs to 48.
Those two numbers are the only figures in the document currently available for comparison, and this newspaper has compared them.
The prospectus allocates 1.67 pages of risk for every page of business. On the page, the thing that might end the company is two-thirds larger than the company.
A valuation is a price for the whole document, and the document is 261 pages long. At more than $2tn, each page is worth approximately $7.7bn. The risk factors therefore account for about $613bn of Anthropic, and the business description for about $368bn.
By this method the most valuable section of the prospectus is the part explaining why there might not be one.
The Department of Unnecessary Research notes that the remaining 133 pages, which are neither risk nor business, come to roughly $1tn, more than the two named sections combined, and has asked what is in them.
Investors will be asked to pay more than $2tn for 48 pages of company. The other 213 come free, and 80 of them are a warning.