Protestors Arrested During #BlockTheIPO Action at NYC Anthropic Offices

Protestors Gathered to Demand Anthropic Halt Its Planned IPO As the Company Begins its Investor Roadshow

As around 40 people protested at the Anthropic Offices in New York City, at least 5 people have been arrested in a #BlockTheIPO protest that is happening now. As the company begins its investor roadshow this week, about 40 1:0protesters, including Stop Funding Billionaires, climate activists, community members, gathered at noon to demand Anthropic halt its IPO due to the risks it poses to working people’s retirement and the economy as a whole. 

Anthropic is seeking to go public at a sky-high valuation despite its dangerously faulty technology and staggering debt, revealed in the company’s registration paperwork for the IPO it filed last week. Further inflating the AI bubble, Anthropic’s IPO would offshore the risk and volatility of the company’s unprofitable financials to the American public. 

Wall Street has already rewritten financial rules so that newly-public, large AI companies can be fast-tracked into workers’ pensions and 401(k)s—meaning working people’s money is being set up to prop up AI corporations. Pre-IPO investors and insiders will be able to cash out, while working people’s retirement money in slower moving index funds will be left exposed to the losses. This reality, which echoes the dot-com bubble of the 1990s and the 2008 housing crisis, is triggering grave concern amongst the general public. 

Capital from the IPO would finance the expansion of a technology with significant environmental costs and documented social harms into sensitive settings, including classrooms, hospitals, and military operations. Billionaire AI executives and organizers alike have warned that this expansion could cause job displacement and economic disruption on a historic scale. Even as Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has acknowledged that AI poses grave risks to humanity, the company is advancing rapidly toward a public offering.

To prevent these severe social, environmental, and economic consequences, Anthropic should halt the IPO. If it proceeds, and the AI bubble bursts, a small group of billionaires and Wall Street investors will accumulate even more wealth and power, while workers’ pension funds, retail investors, and the general public bear the losses.

Stop Funding Billionaires is a campaign of working people including labor, student, and community organizations demanding that pension funds, university endowments, and other institutional investors not invest in billionaire and trillionaire-owned corporations that undermine workers’ rights, public services, and democratic institutions.

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