My breath taken, I looked up from my desk to gaze at the red-orange blanket of fallen leaves just outside my window. I needed the pause, or maybe the distraction, from what I was reading.
The thick document before me looked like any other standard business proposal: a prospectus for an initial public offering with boilerplate language about dividends, compensation and Class A stock. But the more I read, the more it morphed into experimental literature, equal parts business plan, philosophical treatise and sci-fi thriller.
This will be an I.P.O. unlike any other, its language both matter-of-fact and unnerving, its ultimate subject our future. Not futures, as in the stock market, but the future, as in what it might look like and whether we have one.
The prospectus comes from Anthropic, the artificial intelligence concern immersed in the technologies rapidly transforming the human experience. It is poised to offer shares to the public for the first time, and this document, recently filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, lays out its blueprint for potential investors to decide whether to bet on the future of civilization.
I cannot give you odds on this existential gamble. My prior awareness of Anthropic extended little beyond clicking on a button with hundreds of thousands of other writers to join a massive class-action copyright lawsuit. As someone who knows next to nothing about investments, I read the Anthropic prospectus solely out of my vested interest as a human being.
In seeking the considerable capital needed for chips, data centers and electricity, the company — with an estimated valuation well north of $1 trillion — begins its pitch by dangling the possibility that artificial intelligence could “solve problems that have resisted generations of human effort.”
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