Berkeley Law professor: Anthropic’s IPO puts AI accountability to the test

Stavros Gadinis is the George R. Johnson Professor of Law at UC Berkeley Law School, faculty co-director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Business, and author of “Corporate Ordering” (Cambridge University Press, 2026).

Few companies have spent as long warning about the risks of their own product as Anthropic. Its preliminary prospectus, filed Oct. 26, builds on that caution to make its pitch. It opens with a founders’ letter recounting how the company refrained from releasing its most capable model until it built satisfactory safeguards, “forgoing substantial revenue and ceding ground to competitors.” Consider the contrast with the prospectus SpaceX filed in June, after absorbing Elon Musk’s xAI. It described Grok’s “Spicy” Imagine Mode and “Unhinged” Voice Mode as “intended to provide users with greater flexibility and control.”

More than two radically different positions on ethics and responsibility, these are also two entirely different business models. xAI’s monetization strategy leans heavily on advertising integrated into real-time conversations. Revenue requires consumers to engage, and a less constrained chatbot is a more engaging one. This is precisely the pressure Anthropic chose to avoid when it pledged to keep Claude free of advertising. Instead, its trade is trust and predictability. Its biggest clients are enterprises, from banks and insurers to drugmakers. Investors who buy Anthropic’s shares will be buying a bet on this promise. Its unusual governance can protect that promise, but cannot fulfill it alone. The real test is in choosing principles, applying them transparently, and monitoring and reporting failures. On the last task, Anthropic still has further to go.

Anthropic points us to its founders’ sincerity and the governance structure they........

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