Opinion | The Flaw at the Heart of Anthropic’s I.P.O.

Anthropic is about to go public at a target valuation up to $1.4 trillion.

To prepare, the economist and Opinion contributor Natasha Sarin spent many nights examining the A.I. company’s 300-plus-page prospectus — and she found significant risks. Some of those risks are existential, including the possibility of human extinction, while others are merely financial in nature. In this video, she discusses what worries her most about one of the largest I.P.O.’s of the year.

Below is an edited transcript of this video. We recommend watching it in its original form for the full effect. You can do so using the video player above.

Natasha Sarin: What I’ve got here is Anthropic’s 300-plus-page prospectus that the company filed before going public. A lot of this document, nearly 100 pages, is outlining very real risks that Anthropic sees — not just business risks to Anthropic, but risks that its technology has the potential to cause for all of humanity. And those risks are existential, and I mean really existential — like, potentially wiping out humanity.

Archival clip of Dario Amodei: I won’t lie to you, there are real dangers.

But Anthropic thinks that it has a solution for this. Instead of organizing itself like a traditional corporation, where it’s acting in the interests of its shareholders ——

Archival clip of “What Makes Us Tick”: Directors represent the stockholders and are responsible for the way the business is run.

—— Anthropic is organizing itself as a public benefit corporation, acting in the interests of humanity writ large. That’s what the co-founders wanted when they left OpenAI to start Anthropic. But what worries me is that the company is asking us to place a lot of faith in them to be able to manage these very real, very scary risks. And I’m just not sure that it’s capable of doing it by itself.

So let’s look at the company structure first. It’s pretty novel. The real power within Anthropic lies with two distinct groups: Its seven co-founders have a majority stake in the company, collectively, of 50.1 percent. That includes Dario Amodei, the C.E.O. of Anthropic, his sister, Daniela, who’s the company’s president, as well as five other members of the founding team, who all have roughly equal shares in the company and have control of it, and also the capacity to direct its day-to-day operations.