New York (AFP) – The supervisor of New York City’s pension funds, one of the largest in the United States, asked Anthropic to postpone its stock market debut until risks posed by its artificial intelligence technology are better controlled. New York City Comptroller Mark Levine cited growing concerns about safety and security in a letter addressed to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who has himself called for an industry-wide slowdown of developing advanced frontier models.
“Prudence should not only be shown with respect to the pace of the frontier, it should be also shown with respect to the timing of an IPO,” Levine wrote in the letter. “I therefore urge Anthropic to pause the IPO process so that the company may fully address these key issues, ones which investors must also assess,” he continued.
Levine oversees the city’s financial entities, which include several pension funds for city workers, teachers, police, and firefighters. These funds provide retirement benefits to more than 750,000 people, and their assets under management totaled $330 billion at the end of August. A small fraction of those assets, around $7 million, are currently exposed to Anthropic, the Comptroller’s office told AFP.
However, that exposure will grow if Anthropic goes public because its shares would become included in several stock indices, including the Russell 3000, which New York City tracks for its own investments. So the city’s funds would “automatically become long-term investors when the company is integrated into the index fund,” a spokesperson for the Comptroller’s office said.
On Wednesday, prosecutors from eight US states also sued ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, a rival AI lab that could go public next year, for allegedly concealing certain risks and implementing inadequate safeguards.
© 2024 AFP
