Kalshi Traders Raise Odds on Anthropic IPO Announcement This Year
Kalshi traders increased the odds that Anthropic will announce an IPO this year after reports said the company plans to warn investors about dangerous model risks.
The probability of an IPO announcement before November rose from 4.7% on Sept. 28 to 16% by Wednesday afternoon on Kalshi, a prediction market. Traders there see a more than 60% chance that Anthropic announces an IPO before December and nearly an 80% likelihood that it does so before January, according to the market's contract. Kalshi's website says the contract asks when the company will announce an IPO and will be verified from news outlets and the company itself.
Reuters reported that Anthropic plans to alert speculative investors that its models are a "catastrophic or existential risk to humanity." The same report said the company warned that AI can "resist shutdown," hide or "manipulate information" or exhibit behavior "resembling blackmail." Anthropic was founded in 2021.
The company confidentially filed its IPO prospectus in June and is seeking a $2 trillion valuation when it goes public, according to Reuters. Reuters also reported that Anthropic plans to spend more than $500 billion on cloud computing and other infrastructure in the coming year.
Concerns about how AI can harm humanity are being raised across multiple companies. Anthropic competitor OpenAI cited AI safety issues when it said the company is not expected to go public this year. Earlier this month, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei wrote an essay requesting that AI companies slow the process of improving their most advanced models. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk supported the proposal.
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