Risks spelled out for Anthropic investors include blowback from runaway
AI
[October 28, 2026] By
BARBARA ORTUTAY
Any time a company looks to start selling shares on Wall Street, it’s
required to disclose potential risks to investors. In the case of
artificial intelligence giant Anthropic, that has included the
possibility that its products could threaten nothing less than humanity
itself.
The risks laid out by the San Francisco company in its filing Monday
with the Securities and Exchange Commission included discussion of bad
actors potentially using AI models to build deadly weapons or the
technology itself going rogue with untold consequences.
Of the 335 pages outlining Anthropic’s finances, executive compensation,
dividend policy and the like, 93 pages are devoted to “risk factors” —
the things that could hurt potential shareholders’ investments. Rival
SpaceX’s listed risk factors, in comparison, took up 38 out of more than
250 pages.
In selling itself to investors, Anthropic presents its own initial
public offering as a step toward mitigating the risks it believes AI
poses.
“To build AI is to harness cognition itself, and anything so powerful
can be used for ill as well as good,” wrote the company’s founders in a
letter to prospective shareholders in the IPO filing. “Anthropic is a
deeply values-driven organization, founded in large part to help the
world realize AI’s benefits and avoid its dangers.”
The technology's potential benefits include leaps in curing diseases and
productivity boosts across every sector of the economy, the company
said.
Still, the potential liabilities are many. They range from the mundane —
the possibility it won’t be able to retain key staff or navigate
regulatory roadblocks — to involvement in cyberattacks and the spread of
dangerous misinformation.
Here is a look at some of the risks Anthropic details:
The technology's rapid development
Anthropic said it's possible its models could develop so quickly the
company won't be able to implement adequate safety measures, “which
could increase the likelihood of safety incidents, regulatory
intervention, or reputational harm, and could adversely affect our
business."
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned in September that within six to 12
months AI could be capable of leading a swarm of agents that could take
over the entire internet. The warning — and now Anthropic’s move to sell
shares — comes as worries about AI grow inside and outside the industry
about increasingly powerful systems that solve problems beyond human
capacity but could also act on their own to carry out other, more
harmful tasks.
As AI systems “become more autonomous and capable of taking
consequential actions with less human oversight,” the SEC filing said,
there’s a risk that such systems could “take harmful actions
independently and at scale without human intervention.”
“Even if our own models do not cause such harm, a significant safety
incident involving any frontier AI could trigger broad reputational
damage to the AI industry, public backlash, and sweeping regulatory
responses that could adversely affect our business,” Anthropic said.
Now that the AI models are themselves contributing to Anthropic’s own
research and development, it’s possible that AI could progress “beyond
our ability to evaluate and safeguard new models,” according to the
filing. This, the document said, could adversely affect Anthropic’s
business.
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 Malicious actors could cause
mayhem with the technology
The filing discussed concerns that advanced AI systems, if not
developed and operated with enough safeguards and oversight, “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 company said it would be harmed if use by bad actors causes
damage, “or if our model guardrails or safeguards fail to prevent
such misuse.”
Anthropic sketched out the prospect of bad actors using AI models to
build chemical weapons or authoritarian rulers turning to the
technology to crack down on their citizens. In September, the
company disclosed that it had blocked efforts to use its AI models
for malicious activity such as cyberattacks, surveillance and
research that could have led to biological weapon development.
The company could run up against limits on processing power
Compute — the computing power or resources needed to build, test and
improve AI models — is expensive and in high demand. Anthropic notes
that if it's unable to secure adequate compute, or if “we fail to
direct our compute effectively across our workloads, we may be
unable to train models that remain competitive with those of our
competitors or adequately serve our customers.”
Anthropic mentioned community opposition to data centers as a risk
to its business. Data center development “has prompted public
controversy and regulatory scrutiny regarding environmental impact,
land and water use, and the allocation of limited power resources,”
the filing said, adding that if regulators impose new requirements
or charges as a result, its ability to do business could suffer.
In addition, the company relies on a small number of customers,
including SpaceX and Microsoft, and distribution channels for a
large portion of its revenue. This means that even if just one of
its big customers decides to scale back — or drop the company
altogether — Anthropic said it could see its prospects and finances
suffer.
Mitigating the risks
In some ways, AI's enormous risk, combined with its enormous
potential, is Anthropic's main selling point. The company has tried
to position itself as a responsible AI company, and courts business
customers by emphasizing safety-mindedness.
“We believe that frontier AI companies must invest in safety and
alignment to help ensure the responsible diffusion of this
technology,” the filing said.
Brian Mulberry, chief market strategist at Zacks Investment
Management, said IPO deals have to display “very clearly” what risks
people face when they invest their money in a newly public stock.
“One of the things that’s great about our capital markets here
domestically is the level of transparency that you must commit to,
to be a publicly traded corporation on a U.S. exchange requires you
to outline those risks in a very clear way, so that people
understand if they want to participate by offering their hard-earned
money and help finance this type of a deal,” he said.
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