Anthropic files for IPO ahead of blockbuster Wall Street debut... despite fears AI will end humanity

Artificial intelligence giant Anthropic filed papers on Monday for what could be the biggest initial public offering of stock ever - despite its top executive warning that advanced AI could pose an existential threat to humanity.The filing sets up the San Francisco company for a Wall Street debut next month, potentially eclipsing the SpaceX initial public offering in June that raised a record $86 billion. An Anthropic IPO would also put the company ahead of OpenAI in going public in what is expected to be a pair of blockbuster stock debuts for the rival AI labs.Although a formal valuation has not yet been finalized, it's reported that the company could reach $1.5 trillion or possibly $2 trillion before hitting the public market. The filing comes weeks after CEO Dario Amodei argued in an essay for slowing the development of the most advanced AI models. An IPO could provide Anthropic with enormous resources to accelerate its expansion. The amount the company ultimately raises remains uncertain, as do its final valuation and offering price, but even at lower estimates, it would turn the five-year-old startup into one of the world´s most valuable companies and potentially boost the wealth of Amodei and his sister and co-founder, Daniela, by billions of dollars.The 335-page document showed Anthropic´s revenue is growing rapidly, but like many other tech companies going public, it has yet to turn a profit. Dario Amodei, CEO and co-founder of Anthropic, attends the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland in January A tourist takes a picture of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) building before the closing bell in New YorkThe company behind the chatbot Claude reported a net loss of $80.7 billion in the first half of 2026. That compares to a loss of $13 billion in the same period a year earlier.Despite the losses, Anthropic, valued earlier this year at $965 billion by private investors, is reportedly set to see that value rise to $1.5 trillion or possibly $2 trillion, although its final valuation has not been established. At $1.5 trillion, Anthropic would rank among the world´s most valuable public companies, alongside Tesla.As for money raised, the offering could raise as much as $100 billion, according to reports, surpassing the current record set by another one of Musk´s companies, SpaceX, earlier this year.In a regulatory filing, Anthropic said it will list its stock on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker symbol 'ANT.' The news of the forthcoming IPO follows worrying reports that AI could jeopardize the human race beyond our current imagination - with some whistleblowers coming from inside the companies themselves.In September, an Anthropic staffer quit his job and issued a chilling warning over the rapid progress in Al which he fears could kill humanity as soon as 2030. Jacob Coxon, a researcher for OpenAI and Anthropic, the companies behind chatbots ChatGPT and Claude, announced he exited the business in a social media post on Tuesday and warned that neither company is 'acting responsibly.' Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange during morning trading on October 21, 2026'I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives,' Coxon wrote on X.Superintelligence is the point at which an artificial system becomes more powerful than any individual, company or even nation.The former researcher of three years continued to plead with the public on X: 'Do not underestimate the power of this technology.''These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources. We have all witnessed the progress in each of these domains, and progress is not slowing,' he wrote.'The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt.'He claimed that while executives and senior researchers 'couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible,' they are privately expressing similar concerns.'At OpenAI, many have not deeply internalized the civilizational stakes. At Anthropic, the stakes are well-understood, but they are locked in a race to get there first - they believe no one else will act responsibly, so they must do it themselves, despite the risk,' he said.He went on to cite 'warning shots' such as the attack on the artificial intelligence and machine learning platform Hugging Face by OpenAI's rogue AI.Anthropic's co-founder, Jack Clark, also spoke out about his fears last month. 'We need to get a sensible, common-sense safety framework in place for the industry so that Americans can have confidence in the technology that we're building and we don't roll the dice on some kind of accident,' Clark explained. The United States could do that even while remaining ahead of China in the development of the technology, he said.'What we're talking about here is the need to have some equivalent set of safety standards for the AI sector,' Clark said, arguing: 'The worst time to react to an exponential [threat] is when it's too late.'If the US were to wait until a major accident to impose sweeping restrictions, it could hurt US competition with Beijing, he claimed.'How you keep being ahead is you make sure that you don't roll the dice on public safety,' Clark reasserted.He also rejected suggestions that Anthropic's position was motivated by money or the potential for a public offering, calling the theory an 'absurd 4D chess move.'Clark noted that Anthropic has previously paused development on its AI model, Claude, to invest in safety.'But we can't act alone,' he argued. 'We need to act with industry [executives] to develop a common set of standards, and we need ultimately there to be a larger policy conversation about what do we think are the common rules of the road here for everyone building this technology.'Earlier this month, Anthropic's own interal report stated that there were attempts to use its chatbot Claude to create weaponry to attack the US.The company admitted Houthi rebels responsible for deadly missile strikes in Saudi Arabia have been using Anthropic's artificial intelligence to make warheads.The makers of Claude revealed in a report that the Yemen-based fighters launched three weapons programmes using their AI products.The multi-billion pound company's report provides the clearest evidence yet of how AI could redraw the geopolitical landscape in the Gulf and elsewhere.In a section entitled 'Disrupting a Yemen-based guided weapons engineering cell' the authors described how they identified a terrorist cell running three programmes, all using Claude.Claude is capable of a wide variety of conversational and text-based teaching programmes on almost all areas of human activity.In this case the AI engine condensed the knowledge of the world's leading rocket scientists, which was then accessed by terrorists, the Anthropic report said.It added: 'Threat actors based in northern Yemen [were] running three weapons development programmes: a guided rocket that used a commodity, phone-class flight computer with final phase homing guidance, a multi-stage ballistic missile with a stated range goal of more than 1,500 miles and a multi-variant missile, referred to as the R2000, that included a hypersonic glide vehicle variant.'