Leaked IPO docs: Anthropic tempts investors with existential risk warning

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After an unusual pitch to investors, Anthropic has laid bare its challenges in becoming anything like a profitable, normal business in its IPO prospectus that was leaked to the FT on Tuesday.

Posing an “existential risk to humanity” was among the messages reportedly intended to allure investors, as if to say, “We could make you rich, but also you might not live to spend it.”

The Reg has long suspected the apocalyptic schtick which has become de rigueur among AI model builders is suspiciously self-serving. It focuses attention on the supposed power of their technologies while also encouraging regulation of the sector once their claimed-to-be-race-winning horses have bolted.

Nonetheless, the Financial Times points out that a third of Anthropic's prospectus talks AI models with the ability to manipulate, blackmail and exhibit other unpredictable behaviours. Happy days.

But what brass tacks? According to the leaked figures, the maker of the Claude model favored among AI-assisted coders said it plans to spend $518 billion on cloud, computing and infrastructure obligations in the coming years. That’s more than a quarter of its hoped-for value of $2 trillion. The company spent $7.33 billion on compute and infrastructure last year.

Also according to the leaked doc, Anthropic made an operating loss of more than $8 billion last year, although revenue increased 12x to around $4.6 billion.

While Anthropic courts investors with the end-of-the-world spiel, other news suggests we should question whether the underpinning of the AI economy is indeed sound.

Oracle has promised to build $300 billion in datacenter capacity for OpenAI, a rival to Anthropic. However, it has issued a "force majeure" notice to Blue Owl, an alternative asset management company and specialist in private capital, according to reports . A force majeure is designed to allow signatories to opt out of contractual obligations in circumstances beyond their control. The concern lies around Oracle’s ability to get power to a large New Mexico datacenter, which Oracle says is going ahead as planned.

Readers not drawn to the AI doomster narrative might pay heed to the other potential downside in the AI buildout, which is set to see $31.6 trillion in capital expenditure spent before 2050 to meet our supposed need for AI services.

Current investment equates to around a third of all US economic growth, according to figures from August . Estimates earlier in the year put it higher. Were that to collapse, as the dotcom boom did, the effects on the world economy would be dire. With AI, discounting the worst that could happen does not offer much consolation. ®

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