Anthropic Sets IPO Range Valuing Company At Up To $1.4 Trillion, Says AI May Pose “Existential Risks To Humanity”

Anthropic has set a $70 to $78 a share range for its initial public offering, pricing that would value it at over $1.4 trillion at the high end. The AI giant will offer 825 million shares in the IPO that will trade on the Nasdaq under the stock symbol ANT.

At the pricing midpoint, the company is in line to raise over $60 billion. It’s also planning to sell an additional $26 billion worth of shares to big investors including Alphabet’s Google, Advanced Micro Devices, Microsoft, Broadcom and Nvidia, according to an amended registration statement filed Tuesday with the SEC. The company started its road show today.

The document, and the original filing last month, gives new meaning to so-called “risk factors,” a usually boilerplate section in offering documents that, in this case, is anything but.

“Concerns have been raised both within our organization and by other researchers, regulators, policymakers, and industry participants 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, particularly if such systems were misused, replicated, weaponized, or allowed to operate with a high degree of autonomy,” the filing said in dozens of pages ticking off risk factors.

“Our success depends in large part on our ability to continuously develop, improve, and deploy the most advanced, capable, and useful AI models,” wrote the San Francisco-based company co-founded and run by CEO Dario Amodei and President Daniela Amodei.

That said, “Our models have in the past caused, and may in the future cause, harm by producing undesirable outputs or behaving in unintended, misaligned, or autonomous ways, including by taking unintended or harmful actions that no user or third party directed. These risks may increase as our models become more capable and are granted greater autonomy, permissions, and integration with external systems. Although we continue to study why these behaviors emerge, our understanding continues to evolve, and we may be unable to anticipate or understand such behaviors in the future.”

There is more. “In addition, our models have been and may continue to be deployed in high-risk or sensitive contexts, such as healthcare, scientific and biomedical research, drug discovery and development, legal, finance, government, or other critical decision-making environments, and in connection with hardware, where undesirable model behaviors—which are inherently non-deterministic and may manifest in unpredictable ways, such as errors, inaccuracies, biased or unsolicited views, or hallucinations—could lead to serious harm, liability, or reputational or other damage.”

The company also uses AI to advance its own AI. “If our capabilities were to outpace our safety, alignment, and security measures, or if we were unable to anticipate the pace of such advancement, we may be unable to adequately assess or mitigate the resulting risks.”

AI agents may work together, adding to risks. “Agents that interact or coordinate with one another may amplify, propagate, or reinforce misaligned behavior across the group, pursue objectives collectively in ways not intended or endorsed by any user, or take coordinated actions against systems or targets unrelated to their assigned tasks, in each case, in ways that may be difficult to anticipate, detect, or contain. Incidents of this kind have occurred, and we expect the deployment and interaction of larger numbers of autonomous agents to increase these risks over time.”

The shares, which news reports said will likely start trading Nov. 19, will test investor enthusiasm for a sector that’s had a bumpy ride on Wall Street, especially lately, on jitters over whether massive spending on compute, data centers, chips and more, will ultimately generate profits in such a fast moving industry. Publicly traded AI “hyper-scalers” have driven the markets to new highs with some calling a bubble. The stocks took a massive dive last week.

As of September 30, 2026, Anthropic said, it had “entered into purchase commitments and lease agreements, including short-term commitments, as well as leases not yet commenced, with an aggregate committed spend of approximately $900.9 billion, substantially all of which is related to compute and infrastructure.”

Depending on how the offering unfolds, Anthropic’s ambitious IPO may tee up another major IPO from ChatGPT parent OpenAI. The Sam Altman-run company filed a initial registration statement in June but executives have said it’s now eyeing sometime in 2027.

Said Anthropic: “We believe our investments in safety techniques will enable us to manage these risks and responsibly realize substantially more leverage from Claude than we do today in developing AI models. However, we do not anticipate being able to safely use Claude to fully autonomously design and build successive generations of frontier models without meaningful human supervision or understanding, if and when that becomes technically possible. Accordingly, we are considering updates to our Responsible Scaling Policy to keep humans in control of frontier model development at Anthropic.”