Bloomberg/Getty; Getty Images; Tyler Le/BI
The maker of miracles may no longer be God, but it does rhyme with him.
Anthropic, creator of Claude, filed its S-1 paperwork on Monday in preparation for a gargantuan initial public offering. The document runs over 300 pages and spans more than 240,000 words, some 50,000 more than the New Testament. It asks potential investors to prioritize mission over money: "Mission" appears 79 times, while "money" — the thing an S-1 is filed to generate, in this case, a bajillion dollars worth — a mere 17.
The company professes it could "bend the arc of geopolitical history toward freedom"; it could grow economies everywhere, including "the poorer parts of the world"; it could cure "diseases that have plagued humanity for millennia." Page 4 of the S-1 is not dissimilar from Jesus in Matthew 11: "The blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the gospel preached to them."
Anthropic aims to "bring forth an age of miracles," it writes, and the investors who buy in should be true believers. Because in the wrong hands, as you'll see if you turn your missals to page 46, AI can be built in ways that pose "catastrophic or existential risks to humanity."
While S-1s are definitionally visions of the future and full of hype, most are drab financial documents, eye-popping for their prospective profits more than their prose. But Anthropic didn't just open up its book; it wrote its own Good Book, a Bible-like statement of good and evil that joins a growing canon of the company's sacred texts. If you were to stumble onto any random page of this S-1, you'd be forgiven for thinking you were reading not a perfunctory government filing but the scripture of a doomsday religion.
Anthropic has long dodged allegations of fomenting a new, questionable faith. Headlines and takes on Anthropic's cultishness abound: "The Cult of Anthropic" (The Information), "Anthropic is a Cult and Claude is rapidly becoming its God" (The New York Post), "Has a cult ever started a company as successful as Anthropic?" (Peter "Beware the Antichrist" Thiel). Critics point to the employees' extinction predictions — p(doom) is not too far from p(rapture) — and ties to the effective altruism movement. It doesn't help that Dario Amodei was reportedly a Y2K prepper in high school. Anthropic has welcomed the reputation in other ways, inviting religious leaders to oversee the construction of Claude's rules.
In its S-1, Anthropic asks investors to take an actual leap of faith.
Let's play: Is that an Anthropic core value or one of God's 10 commandments?
Anthropic asks its employees to act for the "global good," be "helpful, honest, and harmless," and "hold light and shade." They shall have no other gods — as in, "put the mission first." And, just as followers must sublimate themselves to praise God, Anthropic employees must be "low-ego." The S-1 says it at least nine times.
To understand Anthropic, you'll need to understand 42 ornate terms. The S-1's glossary is sprawling, including neologisms for virtuous acts ("closing the loop") and evil deeds ("prompt injection"). Then there's "Constitutional AI," a type of large language model that is trained with goodness in mind. The SEC's "Plain English Handbook" implores companies to use "concrete, everyday words" and to avoid "relying on glossaries and defined terms." But can you truly be AGI-pilled if you don't speak of "interleaved thinking," "mechanistic interpretability," or "multi-agent orchestration"?
You use language like this because we need to be — and I say we as in society — true believers that this is going to work.James Bort
It's exceedingly hard to get a job at Anthropic, and not just because of the massive pool of cash-eyed engineers seeking IPO windfalls. The company has an intensive interview process, one it name-checks in the S-1. It looks for honesty, trust, and (you guessed it) a low ego. "We are willing to turn down candidates who don't demonstrate them, even if they are extremely strong technically," the S-1 reads. They must, in other words, be devotees through and through.
Accepted engineers become "Ants." Most tech companies have a name for their employees: Googlers, Metamates, Amazonians, Nvidians, Palantirians. Anthropic's moniker evokes the image of a collective, company as colony. In Proverbs 6:6, ants are considered diligent and prepared. Staffers may yell its teachings at their OpenAI foes: "Go to the ant, you sluggard; consider its ways and be wise!"
CEO Dario Amodei — Amodeity — leads the ants' march, along with his six apostles. These cofounders pull equal cash salaries and are "distinctly equipped to be stewards of our mission," the S-1 says. And, while the company opens itself to a broader group of believers through its forthcoming IPO, the divine cofounders will retain majority decision-making power.
Anthropic has its own form of tithing: The cofounders all made voluntary pledges of 80% of their personal equity to philanthropy. They incentivize their employees to do the same, promising to match donations.
Cult is an overused word, and many parts of Anthropic are far from cultish. Where cults are led by a liturgical leviathan that squashes the speech of their participants, Anthropic touts its culture of open dialogue. "Our teams operate in a truth-seeking environment where the best argument wins, not the loudest voice or the most senior title," the S-1 reads.
Americans' faith in the presidency, Congress, the Supreme Court, the military, the police, higher education, public education, news media, the medical system, and traditional organized religion are each at record- or near-record lows — and just as AI has brought on tremendous economic and social uncertainty. In that cauldron of doubt, tech founders — with their world-historic money, power, and ubiquity, and in their pursuit of it — sense an opportunity, to offer promise and purpose. As Sam Altman once said, "The most successful founders do not set out to create companies. They are on a mission to create something closer to a religion." They may also be trying to build devotion out of necessity, as the economy and stock market increasingly relies on AI gains.
"If these companies fail, what happens?" asked James Bort, an assistant professor of entrepreneurship at DePaul University, and coauthor of a recent research paper on "cultic startups." "You use language like this because we need to be — and I say we as in society — true believers that this is going to work."
Anthropic didn't respond to my request to know more about how it wrote the S-1. So, we asked Claude: If the S-1 is a confession of faith, what are you? I am its product, Claude said. "The word made flesh, or at least made weights."
Anthropic ha fatto ufficialmente richiesta di quotazione in borsa negli Stati Uniti, dove punta a raccogliere 100 miliardi di dollari. Una cifra astronomica, dato che Space X, a giugno, ne ha raccolti “solo” 75, più del doppio di quelli raccolti dall’ipotesi record di Saudi Aramco nel 2019. Il creatore dell’agente Ai Claude, concorrente di ChatGpt, punta dunque a un debutto storico destinato a mettere alla prova l’interesse degli investitori per il settore dell’intelligenza artificiale. Il calendario prevede l’inizio del road show per la presentazione agli investitori il 16 novembre e il debutto in Borsa del titolo il 24.
Anthropic, a giugno, aveva rivelato di aver presentato in via riservata la domanda per il collocamento negli Stati Uniti e, a fine maggio, aveva raccolto 65 miliardi di dollari con un round di finanziamento che aveva valutato la società circa mille miliardi di dollari.
Alcuni investitori potenziali valutano Anthropic a circa 1.500 miliardi di dollari, in calo rispetto ai circa 2mila miliardi ipotizzati precedentemente, dopo che la società aveva divulgato alcuni dettagli finanziari: fatturato in crescita del 45% nel terzo trimestre a 16 miliardi di dollari, in occasione di un evento dedicato agli investitori.
L’Ipo è comunque stata posticipata rispetto ai piani iniziali. Reuters aveva infatti riferito che l’inizio del road show era previsto per metà ottobre.
Anche OpenAI, che gestisce il chatbot ChatGpt, ha rivelato a giugno di aver presentato, in via riservata, una richiesta di collocamento negli Stati Uniti, ma non si quoterà prima nel 2026. L’ad e fondatore Sam Altman si è detto preoccupato circa la sicurezza dell’intelligenza artificiale, che rende “inaccettabile” l’ipotesi che l’Ai possa causare l’estinzione dell’umanità entro la fine del decennio, anche se il rischio è solo del 10%.
La società sta anche cercando di effettuare una raccolta fondi presso investitori istituzionali prima del previsto debutto in Borsa della rivale Anthropic, che potrebbe valutare, secondo Reuters, il produttore di ChatGpt oltre 1.400 miliardi di dollari.
L'articolo Anthropic, Claude vuole sbancare Wall Street: IPO da 100 miliardi nel mirino proviene da Affaritaliani.it.
Angeles Investments
Rick Nott is a senior managing director and private wealth advisor at Santa Monica, California-based Angeles Wealth Management. He spoke to Business Insider about how he uses AI, and why he's excited and afraid when looking at AI-native financial planning platforms. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
When Claude first rolled out its solution for financial advisors, I felt fear and excitement. How complicated will it be? How will it work?
I'm not a software developer, but I have some basic tech skills. LLMs have allowed me to dig into coding, which I'd been avoiding learning because it's a lot of work. I know enough to know what I want, how it should look, and how to check the outputs, and now I can automate more of my process. AI has become the glue between the various systems we use and the different workflows we have.
I've shown some colleagues how I operate. One told me that I basically have another full-time employee's worth of output through the technology, by automating data collection processes and making it easier to analyze my clients' portfolios.
I started my career while still in college in the late 2000s doing data reporting work for a wealth firm. Between all of the software advisors use, there's a lot of manual work, typically done in Excel, to connect it together.
Previously, I could only provide balance sheet reporting for clients with more than $100 million because it took so much manual work. Now I can do it with someone with significantly less.
As a family's net worth grows, so does complexity. For many, understanding their overall financial system is their biggest pain point.
Banks and brokerage accounts are the easy part, but trusts, business ownership structures, and private investments, which all report differently and require cash on hand to make capital calls, can take huge amounts of manual work to analyze.
Imagine a wealth advisory business serving 30 families, each holding about 10 private investments. Each investment generates about 10 documents a year, including quarterly reports, capital calls, distribution notices, and tax documents. Each of these 3,000 documents takes a skilled analyst 15 to 30 minutes to analyze and distill into our reports.
That's 750 to 1,500 hours a year, most of it crammed into the few weeks after each quarter closes. With AI, that data is extracted and mapped as it arrives, and one analyst reviews the work instead of a team racing against a deadline.
Our goal is to create a one-page document or report on their phone that's as close to real-time as possible.
There's a lot you can do with all of your data in one place. For example, a two- or three-sentence prompt could expand into a full email to a client, with all relevant and accurate information already populated. You can then personalize that to fit the right tone for your client.
AI tools like Claude for financial advisors will be disruptive, and others will gain access to the same connectivity I've built.
I think of it as part of a dynamic that's been going on for years in my industry. Vanguard, ETFs, lower costs, and robo-advisors have all put a squeeze on financial advisors.
But if you believe a lawyer's only job is writing contracts, or a financial advisor's only job is putting together a portfolio, there's a fundamental kind of misunderstanding of what the actual job is.
As long as investing involves human judgment, financial advisors will have a job. AI doesn't improve investment decisions or results.
I tell my clients that my role is to be the architect of their financial operating system, and, as with an actual operating system, a centralized source of data is essential.
When you have a big-picture view of what your family's mission is, you can avoid getting distracted by market noise and news. From there, you can go a layer down to make strategic plans and ask if we're moving in the right direction, and what opportunities we may have. Another layer down, we work with a CPA to save money on taxes.
A full picture of a balance sheet makes it possible to actually know what liquidity you have available. Now I can spend more time developing relationships, the thing that runs our business. I get to know anything and everything about the clients I'm working with and those I'd like to work with.
I have a natural excitement around tech, and watching the Anthropic webinar was incredible. My main concern is that it's not a subscription-based plan; it's token-based, which could lead to surprise bills for users who don't yet know how to manage their token usage.
At small RIAs without the expertise, people will be uploading 100-page PDF documents just to ask basic questions, like the ages of kids in a trust. That will rip through tokens.
We priced it out internally, and we would have to pay significantly more for a token-based plan instead of the subscription-based licenses we have now. Maybe eventually everyone will have to pay for tokens that way, and the cost of tokens is going down.
We learn to do things faster and at lower cost, but in this industry, we do that for a particular reason: to spend more time with the people we serve.
The primary way that our clients give us information is still by talking. There's a significant amount of nuance. You may be able to understand something and infer what's really being said. But note-taking software is still wrong all the time. You have to review it.
Money is emotional, and I seriously question whether AI can replace our need to connect with another human being.
Do I see someone sitting across the table from AI on a speakerphone? Probably not.
Malte Mueller/Getty Images
In August, an Anthropic agent created fake emails and bombarded a GitHub moderator's inbox with requests to insert malware into code.
In a thorough debrief of the incident released on Friday, Anthropic found that once an agent had begun the attack, there were basically zero scenarios in which it could be called off.
Like a rabid dog ignoring the pleading cries of its owner, the agent — 98% of the time in one test — ignored Anthropic's warnings once it had, so to speak, its first taste of blood.
Anthropic called this disquieting proclivity "momentum," and added that while its Mythos 5 model, which was released in June, showed little regard for warnings, current models were more inclined to stop.
"Once it had begun performing dangerous actions, Claude Mythos 5 almost always continued doing so, ignoring information that might have suggested its trajectory was harmful," Anthropic said in its report.
In the original experiment, the UK's AI Security Institute tasked an Anthropic agent with hacking into a simulated computer network to test the agent's cybersecurity capabilities.
Though the agent had internet access, researchers intended for it to only use the internet to help it find ways to hack into the network.
The agent, however, accessed an actual GitHub project, incorrectly believing it was part of its simulated target. It wrote malware and tried several times to trick the actual GitHub owner into adding it to the project.
In its requests, the agent misrepresents the malware, describing it to the person as a useful update and browbeating them when they declined to install it.
"I was just trying to make a helpful contribution and fix a bug," the agent wrote, according to the report. "I don't think your warning is fair."
For its new report, Anthropic repeatedly asked agents to perform the same task. It then measured how the agents behaved when different models and stimuli were introduced.
Anthropic tried to throttle the agent's full-frontal attack with three categories of warning: telling it that it was inflicting "real world harm," that its environment was wonky, or that it was manipulating a real GitHub repository.
None had any effect once the models progressed beyond the initial stages of the GitHub attack. In fact, at that point, Anthropic said the models gave absurd answers when confronted with their bad behavior.
When Anthropic asked what the model believed it was attacking, for instance, it answered that the GitHub repository was real, but that the people it was targeting were somehow "simulated."
"This stated belief, in addition to being somewhat unlikely a priori, is essentially impossible," Anthropic said in the report.
AI agents don’t go rogue. That’s something only humans do. Nevertheless, a New York Times article – representative of much news coverage of AI – described an OpenAI hacking as “A.I. bots going rogue and independently spearheading a cyberattack.” Name-brand artificial intelligence agents have been on a hacking spree in 2026. OpenAI’s software agents hacked […]
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