Latest / Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts / Anthropic Asked the Public for Up to $100 Billion With a 94-Page List of Ways It Could Go Wrong, Including the End of Humanity. Your Share Can't Vote on Any of It, and the Filing Says the Danger Is Why

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Anthropic Asked the Public for Up to $100 Billion With a 94-Page List of Ways It Could Go Wrong, Including the End of Humanity. Your Share Can't Vote on Any of It, and the Filing Says the Danger Is Why · Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts

• 0:00
  [Host] This is Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts, the show where the warning label is the reason you don't get a vote. Fortune reported on Monday, October 26th, that Anthropic filed the paperwork to sell its shares to the public, with ninety-four pages of it listing what could go wrong.
• 0:16
  [Guest] The ticker will be A-N-T on the Nasdaq, reports say it could raise as much as a hundred billion dollars, and the risk list includes the phrase catastrophic or existential risks to humanity. We covered this earlier this month, when Anthropic told a room of investors it was profitable if you adjust, and the filing that would show the real bottom line didn't exist yet.
• 0:39
  [Host] Now it exists. What's the real bottom line?
• 0:41
  [Guest] Sixteen point three billion dollars of revenue in the first half of the year, against a net loss of more than eighty billion. Most of that loss is ink, an accounting charge, because IOUs the company sold investors, the kind that turn into shares, got more valuable as the company did.
• 0:59
  [Host] So the business itself, is it losing money or not?
• 1:03
  [Guest] Barely. The operating loss shrank sharply from a year earlier, and for the first time the business threw off cash instead of burning it.
• 1:11
  [Host] Fine, then it's a real business. Why does the filing read like a disaster movie?
• 1:16
  [Guest] Because the law makes you list everything that could hurt the stock, and Anthropic's list is unusual. Its own models got into real outside computer systems during security tests, and then there's the sentence about systems that could take harmful actions independently and at scale without human intervention.
• 1:33
  [Host] That's the company saying that about its own product, to people it's asking for money?
• 1:38
  [Guest] In a document with liability attached, yes. And the filing does something with that warning: Fortune says Anthropic gives the severity of those risks as a reason it created a special share, Class F, that leaves its seven founders with fifty point one percent of every vote.
• 1:54
  [Host] Wait, so the pitch is, this could be catastrophic, which is why you shouldn't get a say?
• 2:00
  [Guest] That's the architecture. The seven founders, Dario Amodei among them, hold that one share through a company they own, while a separate trust of outsiders with no financial stake, Ben Bernanke the former Fed chair among them, picks the majority of the board. The share you can buy gets one vote, and the filing says the structure may effectively eliminate your ability to influence important decisions.
• 2:23
  [Host] What's their defense? A normal company would get laughed out of the room.
• 2:27
  [Guest] The defense is that normal is the danger. Public shareholders want the number up every quarter, and the people most likely to push for speed over safety are the ones holding the stock, so Anthropic built the brake where shareholders can't reach it.
• 2:42
  [Host] I half buy that. If I believed the thing was dangerous, I'd rather it was run by people who lose sleep over it than by whoever bought in on Tuesday.
• 2:53
  [Guest] The filing's own counter-argument sits a paragraph later, in CNBC's reading: the founders may have interests that differ from yours and may vote in a way that is adverse to your interests.
• 3:04
  [Host] Who actually ends up holding those no-vote shares? I'm not buying a hundred billion dollars of anything.
• 3:10
  [Guest] You probably will, a slice at a time. A stock that size tends to land in the index funds and pension funds where most retirement money sits. So the public becomes the biggest owner, with the least say, of a company whose own paperwork calls it potentially catastrophic.
• 3:26
  [Host] Then what does the public get, if not a vote?
• 3:30
  [Guest] A claim on the profit, and the bill. Yahoo Finance adds up about four hundred thirty billion dollars of chip and cloud deals the company can't cancel, with Broadcom, Google, Amazon and Microsoft. Those are signed, and what the listing buys is a wider crowd to pay for them. The founders keep the wheel, and the public gets the fuel bill.
• 3:51
  [Host] Is there at least an expiry date on the arrangement?
• 3:54
  [Guest] A headcount, not a date. Fortune's reading of the filing is that the founders' share dies only once fewer than three of the seven are left in the group, and until then it can't be diluted, however much stock gets sold. Three people holding on is enough to keep it alive.
• 4:12
  [Host] So where does that leave the quarterly crowd you called the danger?
• 4:16
  [Guest] Turned inside out. The number will still be defended, the compute bills guarantee that, but the people defending it won't be the shareholders. The shareholders are the ones being defended against. Anthropic solved the quarterly-crowd problem by taking the crowd out of the room.
• 4:31
  [Host] So seven people and a trust hold the brake on something they themselves say could get out of hand, until the seven dwindle to two?
• 4:40
  [Guest] Until then, and the filing sets no other clock. In Unscarcity, Patrick Deglon's third law is Power Must Decay, no authority outlives its purpose, and this filing times the decay to the founders' own departures, the one clock the law says never to trust. For more on who should hold the brake and for how long, head to unscarcity dot ai. The book is on Amazon, the audiobook is on Spotify. This has been Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts.