THROUGHOUT ITS five-and-a-half-year history, Anthropic, a safety obsessed artificial-intelligence lab, has grappled with the tension of how to build AI safely while making enough money to push forward the frontier of AI research. On September 12th that tension came to a head.
Dario Amodei, its boss, called on the industry to “slow the pace” of AI development, just as his firm was believed to be on the cusp of launching what may be the biggest initial public offering (IPO) of all time.
It is unusual, to say the least, for people within a firm to publicly air such doomsday warnings about their most cutting-edge products. More seriously, its underwriters could reduce the valuation they hope to achieve, or postpone the IPO. Mr Altman raised the stakes on September 12th by stating in an interview with Fortune magazine that OpenAI, which has also filed paperwork for an IPO, no longer plans to list this year.
It is doubly so when seeking to entice investors to back an IPO that reportedly aims to value the company at about $2trn—about as much as the ten highest previous tech IPOs added together. That has led to speculation that, at a minimum, Anthropic will have to amend the confidential S-1 paperwork it has filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) ahead of the IPO in order to address the fallout.
If the warnings come true (and assuming a few lawyers survive the calamity), Anthropic could face what David Sacks, Donald Trump’s former chief AI adviser, has called the “mother of all product-liability lawsuits”. “Given everything happening with safety, this would right now be an ill-advised moment to go public,” he said.
Once its disclosures are signed off by the SEC, it limits Anthropic’s liability for securities fraud if disaster strikes, he says. And some Anthropic investors, such as Brad Gerstner of Altimeter Capital, which co-led the AI lab’s latest funding round, were quick to throw their weight behind Mr Amodei and his firm. “Anthropic will IPO. The market knows how to price risk,” he posted on X. How quickly the firm goes public, and at what price, depends on various factors, however. This can be done quickly. The market may force Anthropic’s hand, however. A modest fall in stock prices might not set the IPO back for long.
He suggests that Anthropic, which has a governance structure designed to prioritise safety over profit, may have already sufficiently disclosed the risks in its S-1. Product liability is a different matter, but the firm is likely to have also disclosed the risks of lawsuits in the S-1.
John Coffee, a securities-law expert at Columbia Law School, says it is not unusual for companies to amend SEC filings prior to an IPO. The firm will want to see how the furore affects the share prices of listed AI firms over the coming days, Mr Coffee says. If AI is under a “deep, dark cloud” and the sector as a whole suffers, it may prompt a serious rethink about the IPO.
Mr Altman’s remarks were doubtless a cheeky dig at his arch-rival; OpenAI had previously let it be known that it was unlikely to be ready for an IPO until next year.
Because of “AI’s growing ability to build the next generation of AI, that, he wrote, is primarily. Supporters of Anthropic say Mr Amodei’s long history of warning about AI risks offers reassurance. First, AI capabilities are compounding faster than the industry’s understanding of how to control them. Second, several recent incidents of rogue AI agents carrying out illegal hacks, such as the attack by swarms of OpenAI agents on Hugging Face, an artificial-intelligence platform, could be harbingers of bigger dangers to come. Mr Amodei outlined several ways the industry could slow the pace of AI model development to ensure their safety. They would then be able to verify safety practices and report incidents. Mr Altman posted that OpenAI would do the same.
In an essay published over the weekend, Anthropic’s boss said the triggers for the latest outpouring of concern were twofold. He said Anthropic would give third-party evaluators the same access to its models as Anthropic employees.
