Reported by The Verge AI
Anthropic’s S-1 is a new milestone in Big Tech’s sprawling and lofty promises to Wall Street.
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Investing in any stock is kind of like gambling in the sense that you’re betting your money on a company’s future performance. But how do you bet on a technology that could, in the worst-case scenario, “pose catastrophic or existential risks to humanity,” or best case, “bring forth an age of miracles”?
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To some extent, Anthropic suggests in a letter at the top of its S-1 filing, you have to just believe.
Anthropic’s 335-page S-1 prospectus, filed Monday, is part of a steady hype escalation in Silicon Valley’s interactions with Wall Street. In some ways, it’s not even that bizarre; SpaceX IPO’d in June after filing an S-1 that referenced dinosaurs and “colonizing Mars.” But its sweeping language and sheer volume — including 94 pages of risk factors — is a sometimes overwhelming collision of AI industry rhetoric and a hard financial pitch. Out-of-this-world promises are integral to Anthropic’s survival as a company . That doesn’t make reading the S-1 any less surreal.
In the letter, Anthropic’s founders urge prospective stock owners “not to think of your purchase in purely transactional terms. We hope you will see it instead as an opportunity to be part of something greater.” The march toward advanced AI “is one of the seminal moments in human history,” the letter says. “Our aim is to help humankind chart a safe course through this technological evolution, open new frontiers of discovery, and bring forth an age of miracles.” But the S-1 warns that if things go wrong, the consequences could be disastrous — even an “existential” risk to humanity. Many dangers are laid out in exhaustive detail, including risks that models “behave in ways that no user or developer intended,” leading to “catastrophic” incidents that the entire insurance industry couldn’t afford to underwrite.
Tech startups preparing to go public haven’t always used the information overload approach. “In 1980, a highly touted company called Apple Computer…