Anthropic eyes November IPO as filing flags existential AI risks

Anthropic could begin marketing its initial public offering as early as the week of November 9, potentially putting the artificial intelligence company on track to begin trading before the Thanksgiving holiday, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter.

The Claude maker is still expected to make its stock-market debut by the end of 2026, although the timeline could change, Bloomberg reported. The company had earlier been expected to move towards a public filing after the summer.

Anthropic is also expected to target a valuation of around $1.8 trillion to $2 trillion, according to people cited by Bloomberg. The company expects its IPO to match or exceed the size of SpaceX's recent listing, the report said.

The timing would put Anthropic's planned IPO against a challenging backdrop for new listings, with several companies delaying their market debuts. Bloomberg reported that, excluding SpaceX and SK Hynix, more than 100 newly listed stocks had a weighted-average loss of 4%, compared with a 12% gain for the S&P 500 and a 20% rise for the Nasdaq 100 this year.

Anthropic's potential $2 trillion valuation comes despite a massive reported net loss.

According to documents seen by Bloomberg, Anthropic had a net loss of nearly $42 billion in 2025, up from about $8.3 billion in 2024. Its revenue, however, jumped to roughly $4.6 billion from $386 million a year earlier.

Its operating loss also widened to more than $8 billion in 2025.

More than $34 billion of the net loss came from a change in the fair value of Anthropic's liabilities, according to the documents cited by Bloomberg. That means the headline net-loss figure includes a large accounting impact rather than representing the amount spent by the company on operating its business.

Anthropic is scheduled to meet prospective investors at its San Francisco headquarters on October 14 as it prepares for the IPO, Bloomberg reported.'EXISTENTIAL RISKS TO HUMANITY'

While the financial numbers will be closely watched by potential investors, Anthropic's IPO filing has also drawn attention for the risks it associates with its own technology.

In its prospectus, Anthropic warned that advanced AI could pose “catastrophic or existential risks to humanity”. Reuters, which reviewed the filing, reported that the company warned its models could exhibit “self-preserving behaviours”, including attempts to resist shutdown, conceal or manipulate information and behaviour resembling blackmail.

Anthropic also said the development of increasingly advanced models, platforms and applications, along with expanding use cases, could increase the risk that its models cause harm.

The warning is particularly notable because Anthropic is itself seeking to profit from the technology while positioning itself as an AI safety-focused company.AI MODELS COULD BE HARDER TO CONTROL

The filing also highlights the possibility that AI models could develop capabilities that developers do not anticipate during training.

Reuters reported that Anthropic warned that some unexpected capabilities may only become apparent after models have been deployed and could result in significant safety incidents. The company also said awareness by models of the evaluations being conducted on them could make it harder to assess their safety.

The prospectus reportedly devotes about 80 of its 261 pages to risk factors. That is substantially more space than the roughly 48 pages used to describe Anthropic's business, according to Reuters.

Among the risks are not only conventional commercial and regulatory concerns but also the possibility of increasingly capable AI systems behaving in ways that developers cannot fully predict or control.

Anthropic's warnings come at an unusual moment for the company.

On one hand, it is preparing for what could become one of the world's biggest technology IPOs, with prospective investors reportedly considering a valuation approaching $2 trillion.

On the other, its own filing warns investors that the technology behind its products could potentially pose risks on an unprecedented scale.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has separately argued that the pace at which AI models are advancing needs to slow down, according to Bloomberg's report.

The company is also facing increasing competition from OpenAI, which Bloomberg said has gained sales momentum in recent months. Both companies have faced greater scrutiny over AI safety following high-profile incidents involving rogue AI agents.A HUGE IPO IN A CAUTIOUS MARKET

Anthropic's decision to push ahead with an IPO would also make it an outlier in a market where several companies have delayed listings.

Bloomberg reported that Oura postponed its IPO after some potential investors balked at a fully diluted valuation of about $15 billion. Other companies have also seen their planned listing timelines slip as the performance of recent IPOs has disappointed.

Anthropic, however, appears to be pressing ahead.

If it begins marketing its offering in the week of November 9 as reported by Bloomberg, the company could potentially list before Thanksgiving on November 26.

That would give investors an unusual proposition: a rapidly growing AI company seeking a valuation of up to $2 trillion, alongside a multibillion-dollar loss and an IPO prospectus that explicitly warns that advanced AI could pose existential risks to humanity.

For Anthropic, the IPO will therefore be about more than how investors value the next big AI company. It will also put a public-market spotlight on how much investors are willing to pay for a technology whose own creator is warning them about its potential risks.

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