Anthropic is still planning to go public sometime in 2026, according to multiple people familiar with the matter, even as CEO Dario Amodei stirs up an AI safety panic with calls for the industry to slow down.
Axios reports that despite online speculation Anthropic might delay its IPO over new questions about product liability and looming regulation, insiders say the opposite is true. Sources tell Axios the company views this week’s safety debate as a reason to move faster toward the public markets, not slower. The internal reasoning: going public forces more transparency, and transparency supposedly makes the technology safer.
Amodei kicked off the controversy with a viral essay arguing AI companies need to pace themselves and prepare for regulation. He laid out a three-step plan he insists isn’t a call to halt progress. “To be clear, pacing does not mean halting model training or technical progress, but ensuring companies take adequate time to align and safeguard their models, and for third party evaluators to confirm this,” Amodei wrote.
Anthropic says it has already taken step one, unilaterally giving third-party evaluators employee-level access to check its safety practices and flag incidents — a move Amodei claims doesn’t cost the company its commercial edge or America’s lead in AI. Step two asks AI companies in democratic nations to agree on common safety standards. Step three, the biggest reach, calls for cooperation between democratic and authoritarian governments on AI rules.
Not everyone is buying the altruism angle. Slower model releases also mean lower compute spending, which happens to help Anthropic’s bottom line. The company has also faced accusations that its safety push is really an attempt at regulatory capture — locking in rules that protect Anthropic’s position while boxing out competitors.
OpenAI, meanwhile, is reportedly still eyeing a 2027 listing, with no signs that’s changed.
Skeptics of the idea that safety and public markets can’t mix should note that both Alphabet and SpaceX already trade as public or listed shares without the world ending.
Trump Pushes Back
President Trump has spent the week publicly rejecting the case for an AI slowdown. In a Truth Social post, he questioned why AI industry leaders would back regulations he said could drive their own companies “into oblivion and bankruptcy.”
“AI taking over the World, destroying Humanity, and all other things bad, is a HOAX,” Trump wrote. “No different from RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA — UKRAINE, UKRAINE, UKRAINE — IMPEACHMENT HOAX #1 — IMPEACHMENT HOAX #2 — and all of the other HOAXES and SCAMS that America was forced to endure through the Destructionists’ and Deviants’ foul play and illegal conduct.”
Trump also pointed to Chinese President Xi Jinping’s decision not to slow down AI development in China, and warned that heavy-handed permitting rules in the United States could push American AI projects overseas.
