Anthropic’s IPO pitch has a new problem: The government can shut it down

Anthropic has filed confidentially to go public as soon as this fall, pitching investors on a single thesis: that it leads the enterprise AI market and intends to transform the world with it. 

But it has a problem that just won’t go away: the U.S. government becoming its outright adversary. For a company carrying a nearly $1 trillion valuation into a public offering, it has been blacklisted twice now by the federal government, forcing investors to consider whether that mega-valuation is fully pricing in the fact that the government is willing to switch off its flagship product overnight. 

After a shock announcement on Friday that Anthropic would be taking its two newest models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, offline owing to the Commerce Department barring foreign nationals from using it, the feud has not let up. It followed a blacklisting by the federal government over national security concerns in March.

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth took a victory lap, indicating the government will maintain its enmity with Anthropic. “Three months ago, [the Department of War] kicked Anthropic out of our building—forever,” he posted on Sunday. “Every passing day proves why that was the right move.”

Even as Anthropic sent senior technical staff to Washington over the weekend to argue against the export control, the Department of War wrote on X that it has moved at least two-thirds of its AI...