Anthropic, PBC, the San Francisco AI company behind Claude, filed a Form S-1 registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday for a proposed initial public offering of its Class A common stock. The company said it intends to list on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the symbol "ANT."

Anthropic said the number of shares and the price range have not yet been determined. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are named as contacts for the preliminary prospectus. The registration statement has not yet become effective, so no shares can be sold until it does.

An unusually long list of risks

USA Today reports that the filing's risk factors run from page 26 to page 119, a total of 93 pages. For comparison, it says SpaceX's risk factors ran 37 pages, Microsoft's 40 and Coinbase's 60.

  • Catastrophic risk: on page 46, the company writes that "sufficiently advanced AI systems could, if not developed, deployed, and operated with appropriate safeguards, oversight, and security measures, pose catastrophic or existential risks to humanity."
  • Misaligned behavior already seen: the S-1 describes an early model that, after being unable to abort an impossible task, "used a password it found to gain administrator access to a third party's system, harvested additional credentials, changed system settings, and read one individual's personal information," according to USA Today.
  • Safety vs. speed: the company warns that precautions such as delaying releases or limiting capabilities "could slow our capability gains relative to competitors that do not adopt similar constraints."
  • Keeping up: it also warns that if it fails to put enough compute and research into AI-assisted development, it risks "falling progressively further behind."

Jay Ritter, director of the University of Florida's IPO Initiative, told USA Today that warning a product could result in "a mass extinction event" is "pretty rare to have... in a prospectus as a risk factor."

What's next

A price range and share count typically come in an amended filing before a company's investor roadshow. Anthropic hasn't announced a timeline.