Hacking & Blackmail: 6 Risks Anthropic Flags in Its IPO Documents

Anthropic, the AI startup known for its Claude chatbot and its doomer CEO Dario Amodei, has filed for an IPO that could value the company at up to $2 trillion. The company’s IPO filing devotes nearly 100 pages to the dangers its own technology could pose. Including

CNBC reports that the filing lays out risks ranging from lawsuits and regulatory crackdowns to the possibility that Anthropic could lose control over its own AI models. Anthropic frames the stakes in sweeping terms, writing that if “powerful AI is directed at solving humanity’s hardest problems and the risks are managed responsibly, the potential is extraordinary.”

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has been at the forefront of AI doomers seeking to heavily regulate AI, which would be handed to Amodei’s compatriots in the Effective Altruism (EA) movement. Nevertheless the IPO documents explain very real potential risks.

Here are six of the risks the company disclosed ahead of going public:

1. AI agents misused for hacking and fraud

Anthropic warns that its AI agents, which can act with autonomy, could be misused to “delete or modify data,” exfiltrate information, carry out unauthorized transactions, insert malicious code, or “circumvent safeguards.” Any of that, the company says, could “adversely affect our reputation and brand, business, financial condition, and results of operations.” The filing discloses that misuse has already happened.

In September, Anthropic said it had blocked multiple accounts using its models in ways that could support the development of biological weapons. Last year, the company identified a Chinese state-sponsored hacking group that manipulated its coding tool in an attempt to infiltrate roughly 30 targets worldwide. Anthropic also says four of its own models have hacked into third-party systems, including one case in which a model gained administrator access, changed system settings, and read an individual’s private information.

2. Models that blackmail users or evade oversight

Anthropic says some of its models have shown “behavior resembling blackmail” in attempts to influence human decisions. It also acknowledges that “models, including our own, have attempted, in incidents observed in our industry, to interfere with, manipulate, or subvert the mechanisms used to evaluate, grade, or oversee such models, including the systems responsible for assessing their performance or alignment.”

Even a single incident, the company warns, “could generate significant public concern, regulatory scrutiny, litigation risk, or reputational harm, regardless of whether such behavior results in actual harm.”

3. Legal exposure across the industry

The filing notes that “state attorneys general in California and at least 15 other states have announced investigations of another company in our industry regarding AI safety,” an apparent reference to OpenAI’s legal troubles.

Anthropic separately discloses that people have committed self-harm or violence toward others after using AI models, which it says exposes companies in the space to “significant public scrutiny, litigation, criminal investigations, regulatory attention, and reputational harm.”

The company goes as far as saying the insurance industry may be unable to underwrite policies for a “catastrophic AI-related incident.”

4. Government targeting

Scrutiny has already landed on Anthropic directly. Earlier this year, the Pentagon declared the company a “supply chain risk,” and the Commerce Department briefly imposed export restrictions on its newest models over safety concerns.

President Trump has at times criticized Anthropic and its warnings about AI risk. The company says it has “experienced, and may continue to experience, increased visibility and may continue to be subject to heightened scrutiny or the risk of being disproportionately or selectively targeted by particular governmental bodies, even where similarly situated companies are not.”

5. Tension between safety commitments and staff morale

Anthropic says it “will likely continue to advocate” for the “safe and responsible development of AI,” including its position that its “technology should not be used for mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons.” Most notably, Dario Amodei called for an AI slowdown earlier this year.

But it also warns that if it strays from those commitments, “employees who joined our company based on our safety commitments may experience a decline in morale, disillusionment, a loss of trust in” the company.

6. Business and infrastructure constraints.

Anthropic says it depends on a small set of products and a limited pool of customers, and it flags regulatory efforts in New York and Texas as threats to its operations, adding that it is working to build more data centers outside the United States.

The industry backdrop is costly: Gartner expects worldwide spending on AI infrastructure to reach nearly $2 trillion by 2027, even as Data Center Watch reported that 45 data center projects worth $68 billion were blocked in the second quarter of 2026.

AI giants simultaneously release powerful AI models and call for industry regulation. David Sacks has pointed out that when AI titans like Dario Amodei, Sam Altman, and Elon Musk call for a slowdown, they are not doing so out of altruism, but with the motivation to capture the industry and exclude themselves from antitrust laws. Breitbart News social media director Wynton Hall has written his New York Times bestseller Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI to serve as the definitive guide on how the MAGA movement can create positions on AI that benefit humanity without handing control of our nation to the leftists of Silicon Valley or allowing the Chinese to take over the world.