Anthropic Warns AI Safety Risks, Model Release Restrictions, Regulatory Scrutiny And Potential Autonomous AI Harms Could Adversely Affect Its Business, Reputation And Financial Results, Says "Considering Requiring Human Review And Approval Of Certain Decisions In R&D Processes As Models Perform An Increasing Share Of That Work"

If we are unable to manage the risks related to our focus on and commitment to AI safety, our

brand, business, financial condition, and results of operations could be adversely affected.

Balancing Safety and Commercial Objectives. Our commitment to AI safety requires us to make difficult

judgments that balance safety considerations against commercial objectives, competitive pressures, and

stakeholder expectations. We often make judgment calls with respect to when we determine a model is safe

enough to release and which capabilities to develop or restrict. For example, in April 2026, we initially released

our frontier model, Mythos, as a gated research preview through Project Glasswing, available to select

organizations for cybersecurity applications, rather than making it broadly available at launch due to its

advanced capabilities in cyber vulnerability discovery. We expect that frontier models with similar or enhanced

capability profiles, whether developed by us or by other AI labs, will continue to emerge, and that future

Anthropic models exhibiting such capabilities may be subject to access constraints. More broadly, we believe it

is important to assess the safety of our models not only at release but throughout their development. For

models we anticipate will have novel capabilities or present novel safety risks, we plan to evaluate the safety of

each stage of training, including pre-training, post-training, and internal deployment, and we may delay or

pause a stage when we are not confident in our safety measures for that stage. For example, we recently chose to

delay pre-training a new frontier base model for more than a month to allow time to further enhance our

security measures related to preventing model weight exfiltration and protecting our intellectual property. We

are also considering additional measures, including updates to our Responsible Scaling Policy, to require

human review and approval of certain decisions in our research and development processes as our models

perform an increasing share of that work. There can be no assurance, however, that the safeguards or access

regimes we adopt will prove adequate, that we will correctly identify which capabilities require restriction, or

that constraints we impose will not be circumvented. These judgments are particularly consequential because,

as AI systems become more capable, the potential severity of harm from misaligned or misused models

increases correspondingly, and a wide range of stakeholders, including researchers and policymakers, have

raised concerns that sufficiently advanced AI systems could pose catastrophic or existential risks to society if

not developed and deployed responsibly. Our safety-focused approach is designed in part to mitigate such risks,

but there can be no assurance that our efforts will be successful or that the broader AI industry will adopt

similar safeguards. In particular, as AI systems become more autonomous and capable of taking consequential

actions with less human oversight, there is a risk that such systems could, whether due to misalignment with

human intentions, errors in objective specification, or self-preserving behaviors, take harmful actions

independently and at scale without human intervention. Even if our own models do not cause such harm, a

significant safety incident involving any frontier AI could trigger broad reputational damage to the AI industry,

public backlash, and sweeping regulatory responses that could adversely affect our business. For example, in

September 2026, media reports citing a senior Federal Trade Commission ("FTC") official indicated that the

FTC has opened non-public investigations into the potential risks that increasingly autonomous AI systems may

pose to consumers. In October 2026, the FTC issued a civil investigative demand to us seeking information

about our consumer protection, data protection, and privacy practices, as well as the safety and security of our

products. The scope of any investigation of us or its outcome, and any investigation, enforcement action, or

adverse finding arising from this or similar inquiries could result in significant costs, require changes to how we

design, test, or deploy our models, platform, and applications, or otherwise adversely affect our business,

financial condition, and results of operations. We may misjudge these tradeoffs, either by being overly cautious

and potentially losing market opportunities, or by being insufficiently rigorous and releasing models, platforms,

or applications that cause harm. Even where human oversight mechanisms are in place, such mechanisms may

prove insufficient in practice if the volume, speed, or complexity of autonomous agent actions exceeds the

capacity of human reviewers to meaningfully evaluate and intervene, and any perceived failure of our oversight

mechanisms could expose us to regulatory enforcement, liability claims, and reputational harm. For more

information, see the section titled "—If the use of our AI models results in harm, whether through use by

malicious actors or misuse by other third parties, or if our model guardrails or safeguards fail to prevent such

misuse, our reputation and brand, business, financial condition, and results of operations could be adversely

affected."

Moreover, governmental authorities have restricted, and may in the future further restrict, the availability of

our models, including based on their assessment of the capabilities or safeguards of our models, independent of

our own safety-based access decisions. For example, in June 2026, the U.S. Department of Commerce imposed

worldwide export restrictions on our Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models, which we disabled for all customers until

those restrictions were lifted. For more information, see the section titled "—Governmental trade controls,

including export and import controls, sanctions, customs requirements, and related regimes, could subject us to

liability or loss of contracting privileges or limit our ability to compete in certain markets."