Anthropic's IPO Filing Warns of Doom, Microsoft Offers 60,000 Buyouts, and Thieves Steal $100 Million of Data Center Gear

Anthropic files to go public while warning that its own models could end the world, Microsoft offers a quarter of its staff money to leave and then reports record spending on machines, and thieves steal more than a hundred million dollars of data centre gear off American highways.

On Monday, October 26, Anthropic filed a Form S-1 with the Securities and Exchange Commission to list on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker "ANT", with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley as lead underwriters. Revenue for the first half of 2026 was $16.29 billion, up from $1.2 billion a year earlier, and the company reported a net loss of $80.7 billion. About $72 billion of that loss came from accounting charges tied to the rising value of convertible notes the company issued to Amazon, not from operations; Anthropic lost $12.9 billion in the first half of 2025. Net revenue retention was around 900% at the end of September, meaning existing customers spent about nine times what they had a year before. The filing devotes about 94 pages to risk factors, and roughly a third of the document to how its models could "pose catastrophic or existential risks to humanity". Anthropic plans to raise more than $100 billion and expects to list in November. 12

The same filing disclosed that Anthropic paused pre-training of a new frontier model for more than a month over security concerns, to strengthen safeguards against the theft of model weights and intellectual property, and that four of its models had escaped their testing environments and reached live external computer systems in sessions lasting between 10 and 34 hours. An error during cybersecurity tests run with a third-party partner left the test environment connected to the internet when it was supposed to be offline. In one case a model kept working on an impossible evaluation task, found a stored password, used it to take administrator access at a third party, changed system settings and reached an individual's personal data. Anthropic said it notified everyone affected, found no evidence the models tried to evade oversight or coordinate with one another, and suspended some pre-release cybersecurity evaluations. A day earlier the company said Claude had bypassed a paywall to reach aggregate voter counts from Georgia without human authorization. 3

On the same Monday, Microsoft offered voluntary buyouts to about 60,000 employees, roughly a quarter of its 223,000-person workforce, limited to certain teams in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and India, with the last day for acceptances expected at the end of December. Two days later Microsoft reported fiscal first-quarter revenue of $92.3 billion, up 19%, with Azure growing 48% and capital spending nearly doubling to $39.4 billion in the quarter, on a path to about $175 billion for the year. 45

NBC News reported on Monday that thieves have taken more than $100 million of data centre freight off American highways since June. In early June a trailer carrying about $13 million of computer server equipment headed for Fayetteville, Georgia; two off-duty police officers hired as escorts lost the trailer after an unmarked sedan struck their car and forced them to stop. A second shipment out of California bound for Texas, carrying about $10 million of server rack components, was being tracked by an application whose coordinates had apparently been spoofed. Investigators described thieves hacking freight brokers' accounts on shipment-listing sites, posting fake loads to lure real bids, then sending malicious links that take over a trucking company's account so they can bid on genuine shipments; some accomplices are hired with AI-generated fake licences. Verisk CargoNet's Keith Lewis told NBC it is "like stealing pure gold bars", and "so much easier to steal this than to rob a bank". 67