The Anthropic IPO Is Also a Doomsday Primer

Photo-Illustration: Jobanny Cabrera; Getty Images Comment Loader Save Story Save this story Comment Loader Save Story Save this story Anthropic has officially filed the prospectus for its initial public offering, which means the AI lab has put all kinds of formerly private information on display. While the prospectus contains the eye-popping revenue—and even larger expenditures—you might expect, the biggest section of the filing by far is given over to “risk factors,” which are all the things that could squash Anthropic’s big plans. Or, in this case, humanity itself.

While much has been made about the extent to which AI represents an existential threat to humankind, the specific mechanisms by which it could bring about that destruction are largely opaque. If nothing else, the 94 pages that Anthropic’s prospectus devotes to risk factors make clear both where it sees the danger coming from, and the ways in which its researchers are running toward it in order to win the AI arms race.

“Sufficiently advanced AI systems could, if not developed, deployed, and operated with appropriate safeguards, oversight and security measures, pose catastrophic or existential risks to humanity,” the prospectus reads, citing concerns both from critics and regulators and from inside Anthropic itself. (It’s the first of three times the phrase “existential risks” pops up.)

Anthropic is careful to tie that outcome, though, to a specific process: recursive self-improvement.

The idea behind RSI is strikingly simple. It describes a state in which humans hand over the research and development of AI models to other AI models. AI already plays a big role here—and at least one lab has used something close to RSI to speed up development on a model that punches above its weights —but the scenario that sparks doomsday talk is one in which humans are no longer in the loop at all.

Or, as the Anthropic filing puts it: “Risks will increase as AI systems substantially automate AI research and development if, for example, they accelerate AI progress beyond our ability to evaluate and safeguard new models.”

The prospectus repeatedly makes the point that RSI could lead to AI models that develop faster than the company’s safeguards, and that the company may not even realize it has lost that race until it’s too late. Anthropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

It also gets specific about what might happen after that. “As AI systems become more autonomous and capable of taking consequential actions with less human oversight,” the prospectus says, “there is a risk that such systems could, whether due to misalignment with human intentions, errors in objective specification, or self-preserving behaviors, take harmful actions independently and at scale without human intervention.” This is Skynet territory.

Speaking of robots, Anthropic flags concerns about those as well. “When our models direct physical equipment,” the filing says, “errors, misaligned behavior, adversarial manipulation, or misuse could result in bodily injury, property damage, damage to costly equipment or experimental materials, or the release of hazardous substances, and such consequences may be immediate and irreversible.”

You might think, given the apparently existential stakes, that serious consideration would be given to whether RSI should be pursued at all, much less embraced. In an industry as competitive as frontier AI, though, it’s become fait accompli. Here’s how Anthropic describes that same process elsewhere in the prospectus, this time in a section about the startup’s “core advantages:”

“We refer to this recursive dynamic as ‘closing the loop,’” the prospectus says, “and we believe it is one of the most significant structural advantages in frontier AI.”

Failure to “close the loop,” Anthropic later says, could result in “falling progressively further behind as competitors continuously use AI to further enhance their own development capabilities.” In other words, the same systems that are causing all that existential concerns are the ones Anthropic sees as critical to its success.

Every AI company is dealing with this same tension. When former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon went viral for loudly resigning, he put curbing RSI at the top of his wish list for the industry. Employees at Google DeepMind and elsewhere have had similar revelations. There are multiple bills in Congress, including one cosponsored by Bernie Sanders, that propose a ban on RSI. At the same time, these are for-profit companies, and there are trillions of dollars at stake.

It’s a tricky dynamic to navigate. Recursive self-improvement could become a runaway train that destroys humanity. But until then, just look at how fast it can go.