AI Chiefs Warn the UN, Anthropic Chases a $2 Trillion IPO, Model Prices Fall

This week the warning and the price tag arrived together. Anthropic's chief executive took the AI safety argument to the United Nations Security Council, his company kept preparing what may be the biggest public listing in history, and both big model makers cut their prices on the same afternoon.

Dario Amodei, Anthropic's chief executive, addressed the 15-member Security Council by video call on Wednesday, September 23, and told it that if AI is managed poorly he believes it "could be a risk to humanity as a whole." The council, which is charged with maintaining international peace and security, was meeting during the UN General Assembly at France's request. OpenAI's Sam Altman spoke at the horseshoe table for about ten minutes and said the most important decisions "cannot be made by labs in San Francisco alone." Hugging Face co-founder Clément Delangue told the same meeting that his company had been attacked by AI and had defended itself with AI. 12

Five days earlier, The New York Times reported that the same company is still heading for a listing that could be the largest ever. Anthropic is expected to reach more than $100 billion in annualized revenue by the end of this year, up from $65 billion as of July, and investors seeking a piece of the offering are using those numbers to justify a potential valuation of $2 trillion. The company could release the financial documents detailing its offering within weeks, putting its shares on track to start trading as soon as November. 3 The Wall Street Journal later reported that the listing had moved from October to November so investors could see third-quarter results first, and that bankers plan to use investor meetings to gauge how the slowdown debate might affect valuation targets. 4

The price cut came first. On Tuesday, September 22 — the day before the warning — Anthropic released Claude Opus 5.5 and cut its prices 20%, to $4 per million input tokens and $20 per million output, with cache reads down 60% to 20 cents. Minutes later OpenAI released two cheaper GPT-6 models, Sol and Luna, at half the price of the versions that carried the same names: Sol at $2 and $10, and Luna an order of magnitude below that, at 10 cents and 50 cents. OpenAI also discounted cached input reads by 90%. 5