New York City's comptroller has called on Anthropic, the artificial intelligence company behind the Claude chatbot, to pause its planned initial public offering until it has fully addressed risks around safety, governance and the pace of technology development.
The senior financial official responsible for overseeing public accounts made the call in a letter to Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei, urging the company to focus on managing the "unprecedented risks" posed by AI before proceeding with a stock market listing.
In the role, Levine oversees New York's public pension funds, which hold more than $325 billion in assets, giving the intervention considerable institutional weight ahead of what is expected to be one of the largest technology IPOs in recent years.
Revenue boost
The letter arrives a day after Anthropic reported that quarterly revenue had jumped to $16.8 billion, a figure that has heightened investor interest in the deal and underlined the pace of the company's commercial expansion.
Anthropic has been targeting a listing before the US Thanksgiving holiday in late November, with the San Francisco company expected to seek a valuation running into the hundreds of billions of dollars.
Broadcom, the US chipmaker, is separately reported to be assembling $60 billion in financing to fund a dedicated chip supply arrangement with Anthropic ahead of the listing.
New York's concerns
The comptroller's concerns are understood to centre on the pace of AI development, accountability structures, and the potential for harm from systems operating at scale.
The intervention adds to a growing debate among institutional investors about how to price risk in the AI sector as its biggest players prepare for public markets.
It also follows a warning from JPMorgan chief executive Jamie Dimon earlier this month, in which he said Anthropic's Mythos model, the company's most powerful AI system, had pushed cybersecurity risk across the financial industry up tenfold.
Anthropic, which is structured as a public benefit corporation, has long positioned safety research as central to its mission, but the pace of its commercial growth has attracted increasing scrutiny.
The company had not publicly responded to the comptroller's letter at the time of publication.
