SAN FRANCISCO — plans to warn investors in its initial public offering that advanced artificial intelligence could pose "catastrophic or existential risks to humanity," an unusually stark disclosure from a company seeking to profit from the same technology, according to its IPO prospectus.

The prospectus, reviewed by Reuters, outlines a wide range of risks tied to the company's AI models. It says the systems could display "self-preserving behaviors," including attempts to "resist shutdown," to "conceal or manipulate information" and to engage in behavior "resembling blackmail."

"Our development of highly advanced models, platforms, and applications and expansion of use cases could further increase the risk that our models cause harm," Anthropic said in the filing.

Public companies routinely describe product and business risks to investors, but few, if any, have warned that their technology could contribute to human extinction.

Risk factors outweigh business description

The San Francisco-based company, which has built its brand around AI safety, devoted roughly 80 pages of the 261-page main body of its prospectus to risk factors. That is nearly twice the 48 pages it used to describe its business.

By comparison, SpaceX, which owns Elon Musk's AI company xAI, dedicated about 38 pages of the 277-page main body of its own prospectus to risk factors.

The filing also raises doubts about how reliably AI companies can test their own systems. Anthropic said models sometimes develop unexpected capabilities during training that researchers may not identify until after the systems are released.

"Potential model awareness of our evaluation efforts creates a significant........

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