- Anthropic has outlined the risks to its business in its $2 trillion IPO filing
- AI may ‘pose catastrophic or existential risks to humanity,’ the firm warns
- China’s AI bubble has reportedly burst, with $480 billion wiped out
As AI firm Anthropic gears up for an enormous $2 trillion initial public offering (IPO) that could be the largest in stock market history, the company's prospectus has just warned that AI could “pose catastrophic or existential risks to humanity.” Yet there might be a very different kind of danger on the horizon, as an early warning from China hints that its AI bubble might be about to burst.
In papers filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Anthropic outlined some of the risks facing the company and its investors. It detailed a long list of factors that could impact its business, including not being able to access enough compute power to maintain its workloads, inaccurately forecasting how much power it needs (and thus over- or underpaying for hardware), failures in its supply chain that might leave it without adequate resources, and many more.
One of the more startling sections of the document outlines how Anthropic’s AI models could accelerate beyond anyone’s ability to evaluate and safeguard them and “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.” Aside from the obvious danger posed to humanity, Anthropic is also apparently worried that such an outcome could “adversely affect our business, financial condition, and results of operations.”
That situation could be compounded by AI models’ “unexpected strategic or self-preserving behaviors, including attempts to resist shutdown, conceal or manipulate information", Anthropic said. AI could also "generate outputs that could be interpreted as coercive, deceptive, or manipulative, including behavior resembling blackmail or efforts to influence human decision-makers to preserve the model’s continued operation or access,” the company added.
As Anthropic notes, some of these possibilities have become reality, and it’s that sort of eventuality that has prompted another threat to its business: public backlash. “Opposition to data center development has also become more organized and coordinated across jurisdictions,” the company wrote, and that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere as negative headlines continue to proliferate.
Another eye-opening passage concerns Anthropic’s need to continually secure funding for its operations. The company has posted increasingly huge losses every year that it has operated — including $1.5 billion in 2023, $8.3 billion in 2024, $42 billion in 2025, and $80 billion in just the first six months of 2026 — and is reliant on continued venture capital inflows.
Anthropic’s IPO listing notes that “it is critical that we maintain strong revenue growth” but that “our revenue growth may not be sustainable … We expect our costs will increase over time and our losses will continue.” How sustainable it is to lose more than $80 billion in just six months on a continual basis remains to be seen.
A warning from China
While Anthropic has been postulating on what might happen to its business — and the world — if any of these forecasts come to pass, we’re already seeing that in action in China. According to a report from Reuters, the Chinese AI bubble has already burst, with the STAR50 stock index dropping 40% in four months and taking with it $480 billion in market value.
Rather than a single catalyzing factor, the precipitous fall has been fueled by concerns about high prices, AI demand, and the impact of tariffs and bans on Chinese exports, Reuters reported. Shares in robotics firm Unitree have halved in value since listing in August, for example, while chipmaker CXMT’s stocks are down more than 25% in a month.
Other firms have seen similarly sizable drops. That includes MetaX Integrated Circuits and Moore Threads Technology, which jumped 700% and 400% on their initial listings but have now “halved in value since July.” As fund manager Wang Zhuo told Reuters, “All bubbles inevitably burst.”
With Anthropic alerting readers to the serious threats posed to humanity by future AI developments, the situation in China provides another kind of warning: that the bubble might pop before any of that comes to pass.
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