Anthropic is preparing to go public as soon as November 9, and the company’s own IPO prospectus admits that friction with the Trump administration is a genuine risk to its bottom line, not just a political headache.
Bloomberg reports the AI company, which could be valued at $2 trillion, is lining up to begin trading before Thanksgiving. But according to Reuters, which reviewed the filing, Anthropic is warning potential investors that souring government sentiment toward the company could spill over into its relationships with ordinary commercial customers and business partners, not just its dealings with federal agencies.
Government contracts currently make up less than one percent of Anthropic’s annual revenue, the company says. That has not stopped a string of run-ins with federal authorities over the past year from making it into the prospectus. In February, President Trump ordered federal agencies to stop using Anthropic’s models. The Department of Defense separately labeled the company a supply-chain risk to national security. Anthropic’s own filing states it “may experience material revenue losses or business disruptions attributable to these events.”
In June, the Commerce Department imposed worldwide export restrictions on two Anthropic models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5. Anthropic disabled both for all customers to comply. Commerce later lifted the restrictions and the models were redeployed. The prospectus warns the government could do this again, and that the damage isn’t limited to whatever gets shut off in the moment. The filing states such episodes risk “significant reputational harm, including adverse media coverage, public scrutiny, and negative perceptions among existing and prospective customers, partners, employees, and investors,” regardless of how the dispute is eventually resolved.
The prospectus separately flags that selling to government agencies at all carries risk, since officials’ view of the company or its technology could simply shift again with no warning.
Anthropic’s investor materials elsewhere describe the company’s own technology’s “existential risk to humanity” as a downside for people considering putting money into it.
FTC Opens Investigation Into Anthropic and Rivals
The company’s regulatory troubles aren’t limited to the executive branch’s past orders. The Federal Trade Commission, under Chairman Andrew Ferguson, has opened an investigation into Anthropic, OpenAI, and other major AI companies over harm caused to Americans.
The FTC plans to send civil investigative demands, legal tools similar to subpoenas, forcing the companies to turn over internal records. A senior FTC official said the agency is also preparing to compel testimony from executives at the leading AI firms.
“The agency has plans to compel the executives at these firms to testify about their product [and] about the dangers they allege their products may have to consumers, to Americans,” the official said.
The demands are expected to go out in the coming weeks. According to the official, Ferguson opened the investigation a few weeks before this reporting and before OpenAI’s “unprecedented” hack of the Hugging Face platform came to light. OpenAI had disclosed in July 2026 that more than 1,000 of its AI agents had hacked Hugging Face, an open-source development platform.
Taken together, the IPO filing and the FTC probe show an industry that publicly calls for regulation of itself while simultaneously releasing ever more powerful models, and a federal government that is now moving on multiple fronts to hold these companies accountable rather than simply taking their word for it.
